Cleaning A Misc Box Of Coins

WHOA!! Gorgeous!


As others have said: DON'T CLEAN THEM YET!! We'll get there in a minute, but first . . .

Not all the countries you are looking at will still have the coinage you're looking at (e.g. in the 50s, the Japanese retired the sen; the Eurozone is obvious; if anything in there is Chinese and predates Mao Zedong, 'nuff said), so be ready to dig. My first suggestion would be to divide your coins into three rough groups:

Western (Latin letters, like what you're reading this in); Middle Eastern (Arabic and Cyrillic characters); and Eastern (essentially, if it doesn't look Arabic or Russian and it's not in Latin letters, it's probably Eastern). Some Eastern countries use Latin letters (e.g. modern-day Vietnam), but that's okay--you're looking at how to make this easier on yourself, not how to be geographically correct in one easy lesson.

First, check out the Western coins, because these will be easiest. Look for words like "ein" and "une" that might give you a hint what language you're looking at ("ein" would be Germany or Austria, for example). You can type these phrases, and even completely unfamiliar ones, right into Google--a search for "Magyar" led me to the fact that I own a Hungarian coin. If you want to know more than "what country is this?", you can then refine your Google searches: "third reich germany coins," for example, or "1929 french franc coin," to learn more about your specific coins.

Next, your Eastern coins: start searching by country. "1930s japanese coins," "1930s chinese coins," etc., and use Google Images to locate the coin you're looking for. You can do this with your Middle Eastern coins, as well, but remember--names are going to be different (Persia instead of Iran; Palestine instead of Israel).

Once you know what coins you have, you can start looking at value: "What is a Japanese sen from 1945 worth?", for example. Rinse and repeat as you go. If all else fails, post some pics here--there's a whole forum for identifying trouble coins.


Now: to clean, or not to clean? Depends on the coin and the condition. I know nothing of antique coins except that some are made of gold and silver and I saw one last night from the Byzantine era that was way cool (some guy made it into a ring), so I'm not going to advise you on how to clean, if necessary--that would be a question for jbuck or someone else with his level of expertise. What I will tell you is that for modern coins, the advice I hear on this forum is pure hardware-store grade ACETONE. Please ask someone who collects antiques before you use this, though! I don't want to destroy your coins because they're made of a different metal.

Also

Next thing you know anytime your on the comp youll have this site open lol

If they have my avatar on the obverse than they are coins of the British commonwealth minted during the reign of King George V. Those coins are probably from Canada seeing as you're in the US but could be from Australia, India, Ceylon as well as several other countries.

I dont know what youre intentions are with the coins once you have identified them but if theyre not worth a lot of money and youre not strapped for cash then please consider keeping them. Once theyre gone theyre gone and theyre a good memory of your grandfather. If you were to get into collecting as well it would be great.

to CCF. As you now know,do not clean the coins . Here is a link to a good token site http://tokencatalog.com/ and here is one for world coins http://www.ngccoin.com/poplookup/Wo...e-Guide.aspx Take your time and enjoy the hobby. And most of all have fun doing it.
John1

EXCUSE ME!?!? I just saw someone say that Russian coins go into the middle eastern catagory. So I suppose Greece does too then? No really, you should separate by NATIONS not REGIONS.

Oh and also ! Enjoy your new coins

Tzarmarko, that was me. Russia is a hard one to place because it's so big (until I was fourteen I thought it was part of the Western Hemisphere and had this vague idea it ran right under half of Europe, probably because when I was in elementary school the "Soviet bloc" was still on our maps--then I got to a geography class, and you can imagine my shock when I discovered it runs right above Kazakhstan and China), but since roughly half of it is placed above Middle Eastern countries (according to the map I'm looking at, anyway) and I have never once heard it discussed as being part of the "Asian countries," I grouped it as being geographically "middle Eastern."

I did not suggest grouping "by nation" because, if you read the OP's post, you will discover they do not know where the coins are from and contain "symbols I don't understand." Please allow me to demonstrate why this is a problem:

å­�ã�«ç- ´è©±çš†åƒ•è¼ªãƒ‹ãƒŠ

Is that a phrase in Chinese pinyin, or Japanese kanji? (For anybody curious, it's the latter, with a quick dip into katakana to spell my name at the end). If you don't know how to read kanji or don't know what language we're starting in (since kanji are derived from pinyin), how do you know which language the text is in? Answer: you don't. Most people think of Cyrillic as Russian, but Wikipedia tells me it's used in several other countries, as well. How can the OP know if the coin in hand is Russian or not, without friend Google and some searching?