Revisiting 2019 And My Collection

2019 was the year I got serious into coins.

I've always had coins from the time I was young I could remember picking up interesting coins I would find in circulation. Growing up in Portugal and with colonies in Africa and Asia I would find pretty cool coins. I would store them in a metal box in my room. My mom went to Portugal this year and brought back most of the salvageable coins I had. This is some of what she brought back.



When we moved to the US I kept on collecting any different coin I found. Mostly small cents. In my 20's I finished my first small cents collection with a few I picked up. Still looks good for a 30 year old set (different folders though :))



For a few years I didn't do much but still saved any wheat cents and silver coins I found and I would get ASE a few coins when I found them at good prices. In my 30's I started getting US mints sets, mostly uncirculated coins and State Quarters. I completed the State Quarters and took up astrophotography.

I got pretty good, ended up doing a few gallery shows, sold off a lot of prints and even got published in Sky and Telescope, a book and several news papers.



In 2018 I decided to look through my dad's collection and see what he had. Most weren't worth more than melt but he had enough with all of mine to actually let me almost complete a few sets. With my last show in September 2018 and losing some interest in Astrophotography, I decided to get back into coin collecting. I ended up in 2018 cataloging everything I had, selling off lots of duplicates and any junk silver I had. I also put together a priority of items I wanted to do in 2019.

So in 2019, I decided to get serious. First off was getting some books on coin collecting, doing some reading (mostly on here, but also on Coinweek and CoinWorld). My first major task to take all the small cents and move them to albums. That happened early in the year. After moving everything, I was only a few coins short of having a full set of 1880 to 2018 small cents. I completed the Wheat cents first.






Then completed the LMC and LWC.


Because of jbuck I ended up getting Dansco albums.



After completing the LWC, LMC and the LSC I wanted to complete the full small cents so I have 4 LCS locally (within 30 minutes) that have IHC, picking up a few every week let me finish that set. I also found an 1877 at a great price.



From these 3 sets, I realized I had enough coins to do a 20th and 21st century set. I did this one in Whitman because of Carl.






And while doing this set I fell in love with Peace dollars. So lets finish that one also. The Peace dollars were the only set I started and finished in 2019, all others I had a majority of coins already from the 40+ years of buying here and there.



And since Mercury dimes are also beautiful, I completed the ones from 1916 to 1937 that I didn't already have.


My final major purchase for 2019 was the ASE in Enhanced Reversed Proof, I only learned of this one because of CFF (thank you CFF).



So 2019 was the year I got serious. Its also the year that I learned a lot. So thank you my friends for all your advice and help. A few of you really helped me with very generous deals on coins that I was missing and I appreciate that!!

Looking forward to 2020.