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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Moe &quot;Wolfy&quot; Wilder, post: 5131262, member: 114824&quot;]The reason I ask is probably rather obvious to those who have spent any time cleaning ancients. It becomes increasing difficult to keep track of which coins came from which lot. Logically, it can be done with copious amounts of labeling, by never combining lots and by never working on more than one lot at a time. I&#039;ve tried doing this before and am trying again with my current lots, but it gets more and more difficult as the months and years go by. Dozens of lots and hundreds of coins start to overlap in time, space and a little dementia (sic) while the individual coins clean at different rates. The meticulous tracking isn&#039;t always foolproof, and the process eventually starts to become wasteful in terms of time, space and resources. Electronic records can be lost, paper labels get old, worn out and fall off, and the soaking jar to shelf space ratio can get out of balance.</p><p><br /></p><p>I appreciate all of the conflicting and contradictory answers because they confirm what I suspected...&nbsp; That no one really knows for sure. I&#039;m guessing that there isn&#039;t an &quot;official rule&quot; for uncleaned coins due to the unfavorable view many &quot;experts&quot; now hold toward the hobby, but the reality is that at least 99% of ancient coins (with the exception of gold coins which do not readily decay or bond with dirt) and probably no less than 50% of medieval coins, whether they reside in museums or private hands, whether their provenance is recent or venable, were at one time an unidentifiable, uncleaned coin. If a paper trail going all the way back to the digger was not required when &quot;Duke Funkledorf&quot; owned it &quot;ca. 1789&quot; then adding that requirement now based on the assumptions and attitudes of the current crop of &quot;experts&quot; seems rather arbitrary and unfair.</p><p><br /></p><p>For the record, I&#039;m tracking my current lots by seller and purchase date whenever possible (placing my name second in the provenance), but unfortunately, some of my &quot;current&quot; lots were purchased over 7 years ago and I have lost some of the records and labels from that time period. To make matters worse, I think some of the older lots that have lost their documentation have been mixed together and a few undocumented coins from those lots have been mixed into one of the older, but still documented lots.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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