Silvercoins, Pre-64 To Melt?

My suggestion is to make a list of what you have. Then if you don't want to spend any money on this collection, go to the PCGS web site where they have a listing of prices for coins. Same with ebay, Numismatic web site and many others. If you want to spend a few dollars, go to a book store, coin store, coin show and purchase what is called the Red Book by Whitman Publishing. All such price listings are usually about 20% to high except ebay due to that is what they are selling for.
One of the biggest problems with just looking up the values of coins, even if you know how to grade them, is most people miss mint errors. Some error coins are so popular they are worth thousands of dollars. Of course this means you must look at each coin carefully. If you do buy the Red Book, in the back about Page 401 there is discriptions of the different types of errors. And even there they miss some such as rotated reverses.
And please remember that even the worst coin, least valuable to you, could be worth a small fortune to some kid just starting out in coin collecting.

I'm curious to know all the dates. Especially the Morgan dollars.

Melting them introduces an unknown, regarding the purity and quantity of silver in hand.

If I was in your situation, I would compile a list of all the coins, or do about 100 at a time, and then compare it to the values in a book of your choosing. After you get all the values down, you can decide what you want to do. You are bound to find coins with numismatic value, some that you might even want to keep and pass down to your family members.

The Morgans are a couple of 1882s, an 1886, several 1890, couple of 1899, a 1904, several 1900, a 1921. The Liberty Dollars are all 1922, and one 1924. They are all O or no mintmark, except I have, it turns out, one Morgan with the CC mint mark.

Thanks, Serious! I think I'm going to do that. The book, that is. Too bad I can't pack the whole thing up, take it somewhere to a collector and know that I'm dealing with someone that isn't going to be trying to shave every nickle off the deal. The endless detail and fear of being taken to the cleaners is probably going to drive the entire enterprise back into the toolbox and the bottom of the closet for another 8 or 10 months. It surprises me that the market can crash, that the cash supply and deficits can go up and up and up, and yet with all that, the price of silver continues to drop like a stone. It makes no sense, but there we have it.

All this complication over a couple of dozen silver dollars (I have a bunch of 1oz Liberty bouillon coins from the mid-to-late 1980s, too), and I haven't even looked into the (cumulatively) thousands of half dollars of several varieties, quarters from the early 1930s through 1964 and dimes dating back to the mid-teens through 1964. Nickles and pennies dating back to the beginning of the 1900's complete the collection, but I just don't have the head for the details like you guys. Like I said, my kingdom (or my collection) for an honest collector, rather than a dealer. I have a feeling the entire project is headed for the back of the closet once again..

Perhaps I'll muddle along, get 50 posts, and list some of this stuff and try to sell it here, who knows? Meanwhile, thanks for the replies, folks. If I don't move even one of anything in the collection, you peeps have given me some perspective I didn't get anywhere else, and for that, I owe someone a drink.

Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C. area..