Identifying And Selling My Dads Tokens And Medals

to the Community!

to the CCF

We would like to help you, but you need to help us too.

Since you have hundreds of pieces we need to help you do some work yourself.

You also need to crop your pictures, show both sides, and post them right side up so we can read them better.

I see a number of "good for" tokens as well as medals.

The first is a 500 Peso coin from Mexico.

Many tokens can be identified via a good website called tokencatalog.com.

This however, does not give valuations. There is no general purpose catalogue for all tokens and medals. the token and medal market is quite different from coins. ebay is your best bet here.

You can get valuations of world coins from NGC.com

Further to my previous post, I was a bit rushed and I should have said a bit more.

With that many items, since you said you wanted to learn about them, here is my general advice:
1. You need to learn to determine whether it is a coin or not. A coin in almost all cases has the name of the country, the denomination and the year of issue. Once you have that, you can go to standard catalogues (Krause in paper, http://www.numista.com online) to find the catalogue number and other details. http://www.NGC.com has got a section with world coin valuations (prices in the Krause catalogue). To be quite frank, most coins that circulated after 1960 are not worth more than a few dollars, unless they are silver or gold. Well worn common ones are probably not worth more than 10 cents each. If the language is giving you difficulty do a search of the inscription. If it is a non-Latin alphabet, we can help. Using these resources you should be able to identify 95% of your coins, and you can ask us about the rest. You also need to be able to assess the grade of a coin (just minted to just about worn out).
2. "good for" tokens are just what they imply. Thousands of businesses used to issue these. If you have the business name and location then that is pretty much all that can be said about it. None of these were ever issued in large quantities, usually 1000s at most, since a lot were only intended for a small local business. There is an active market for the older ones (you can tell by the style), but it tends to be local and small, as are the catalogues. So their rarity does not mean huge value since the collector demand is low compared to coins. An older one in decent shape is worth at least a few dollars. If you do have a business name, the value is much lower. Modern or generic tokens, like for an arcade, are often quite common and have a small value.
3. A lot of all the other things you might have would be medals. The variety is huge and there are no general purpose catalogues. Like good-for tokens, they may be issued in small numbers and have a very specialized collector demand. Some medals were mass-produced for the public to celebrate an important event. Some military medals are quite valuable and if they are named might be of historical interest.
4. If all this is a bit overwhelming, take the lot to a local coin shop and see what they have to say (but don't sell them). The better ones would be glad to give a quick look and give you some advice.

Good luck with your numismatic adventures.

Oh, and just to mention it just in case you didn't know, a coin is something that is made to use as money, and a token is something that looks like a coin that is NOT money.

Further, we were at the US Mint in Philadelphia recently (amazing place!) and they has a thing on the wall that explained it differently. A coin usually needs to be flipped over top to bottom to see the other side whereas a token or a medal would need to be flipped left to right because it is often hung like a pendant!