New Member From Tennessee Revised Question - Selling Inherited Collection

If you have, say, 250 lbs of silver, what you have in raw bullion value alone is mid-five figures. As stated above, proceed slowly with a reputable dealer.

it would take a lot of time to review this many coins. you can bet the majority are most likely common coins pulled from circulation but you dont know what could be hiding in there.

jf there is no one that understands mint marks and there locations on a coin then T_BOP's suggestion may be your best bet unless you are willing to put some work into it.

your only other option is if you have some time on your hands before you sell the entire lot for silver

1. separate all the coins by series i.e. Barber halves, Morgan dollars etc.
2. go to http://www.numismedia.com/fmv/fmv.shtml and look up each series. I would use the mid-grade of XF as a basis for value
3. lookup each coin. you are looking for coins that have considerably more value than the most of the others in the same grade. these would be premium coins
4. record each of these coins on spreadsheet, number them and set them aside so you can reference them later
5. post a photo here of both sides of the coin for assessment and possible value

it comes down to the amount of time you have. are you willing to learn where the mint marks are on each series and spending time looking them up. if so you can end up with more than selling them off to a local dealer. if you dont have a local dealer then you are pretty limited on what to do with them

this is going to be a little work but may end up finding a couple coins with decent value.

it would be interesting to hear what your thoughts are on proceeding after hearing our members

Did your father keep lists of the coins and the grades he gave those coins? If so, you could post those list here and we can quickly scan those lists to see if you have anything of value.

There are somelists somewith his grades some without.Looks like at least 400 Morgan silver dollars,some he grades BU.The last list that I have found was from 1979 where he listed the coins and what he paid for them.There is page after page of lists plus and index card file listing the coins and how many of each he had.Having still not viewed the collection I don't know how accurate the list is.I have also found some gems that he bought suh as ruby,sapphire,and what looks like diamonds.

I think we could all give you solid advice, but you need to make a list of what you have. Once we see the list, we can give you advice on what to do about each category, maybe with a follow up question or two. Like, how much of the silver should be sold at 'melt values'? That could easily be 50% of your collection, and you could safely sell anywhere. And do you have a bunch of rolled wheat cents? a collection of Buffalo nickels? We have experts in it all. For sure, the worst thing you could do is to sell it all together at a local place without knowing what you got.

I would suggest that you also purchase a catalog of coins. For example, " Red Book Price Guide". There you will be able to roughly evaluate your coins and find out a little information about them.