Need help sorting coins [solved]

Hello everyone, I’m new here recently bought a coin album with a couple of pages, where I started putting coins from countries I’ve visited, which isn’t much, But my grandfather used to travel a lot due to the nature of his work, he went to 73 different countries, and he used to bring back a lot of coins Every time. I’ve got about 7-12 kg wortb of coin bags from his expeditions and I want to sort them all and display them but I’m not sure how to start, or what to look for when sorting them or in what order. they aren’t even sorted by country they’re all just mixed in bags.

so I need help, because I want to do it properly, and I want to be able to enjoy these coins for a long time, not sure how to preserve them From oxidation/spoiling. 
thanks

Even though I am not a experienced collector, I'm going to answer. If I give any terrible advice, maybe someone will correct me, and then we'll both learn.

I inherited a shoebox of loose mostly German States coins. I bought a set of assorted cardboard flips on amazon with supposedly safe mylar windows and stapled all the coins in those. That makes them safe to handle and protects them from being damaged by contact with the other coins. I think I will redo the flips with better quality ones from somewhere reputable like Wizard Coin Supply, and use a “flat” stapler this time.

Then I identified them all (almost all) and sorted them into binder sheets that hold the 2x2 flips.  It's maybe not great for displaying them, the flips make them a little hard to see clearly.

To identify them, there are reference pages of the names of countries in their language, and what various international scripts look like. Google Lens is pretty good at identifying the country and translating the text, at least for 20th/21st century coins in good shape. And this site is pretty good to find the exact match, especially if you use the diameter and weight, so get a little postal scale, if you don't have one. I mark each flip with the country, year, face value, and a reference number, usually KM. I bought copies of a few KM books, but don't use them much.

hope that helps,

Definitely not bad advice. Personally I would make sure that the plastic bags that are currently used right now are a good temporary storage (not out of PVC or similarly unsuitable material for coins). If it has to be plastic bags I would use LDPE (Low Density Polyethylene) bags, or HDPE (High Density Polyethylene) or PP (Polypropylene) plastic boxes until you can acquire actual storage like albums or coin flips.
 

Hot is generally bad (faster chemical reaction) but in combination with moisture it gets exponentially worse. But Egypt is hot, but I guess dry place? So it should be good. 

Start with coins that you can recognise, read the language of or at least are familiar with the characters so you can use the Numista search to identify your coins (How can I search the catalogue?). For coins that you can't read or decipher use elements like animals or buildings etc. and in combination with diameter, weight and material you will often find more common coins. For harder cases the image recognition like google lens or the Numista picture search have a high success chance if you have a coin with enough details and took an OK quality picture.

Then if you are still stuck there is always the Numista ‘Coin identifications and valuations’ where you can ask for help (you have to provide enough information though, like pictures, diameter, weight).

Hi there,

So I think before you spend a fortune on albums & cardboard flips etc, you kind of need to decide on what is of the greatest interest to you.

12kg is probably 1,000 - 1,500 modern-ish coins.

So buying proper individual storage is going to have some cost & you really want to limit cost when you start collecting.

Plus you may not want to spend more on storage units than the value of the coin itself.

I think what I would do is:

1 - Try to organise any many coins as possible into countries. If you have a lot from a specific area, you could sub-divide it into decades, monarchs, that kind of thing.

Don't do it in one big go. Maybe do a handful a day or whatever you're comfortable with.

You can use just anything at this stage, plastic food storage bags, old plastic bank coin bags, whatever.

Anything that you think looks especially interesting, of unusually high quality, or otherwise significant to you (e.g. maybe your grandfather talked about it), put to one side. I'm going to call this the “Special” pile. 

Anything unidentified, put into an “unknown” pile.

As you're going through the coins, try to think of what type of collection do you want. Do you want to try and get one from every nation, maybe a full set of your country's circulating coins, one of every monarch. Whatever, it's your collection.

2 - Once you've been able to divide them into countries, you'll have a feel for what you have and hopefully be able to pick a target goal.

3 - With your goal, you can then start looking at how you want to display the chosen coins. Many options here, from keeping them “loose” in coin albums, or getting cardboard flips (which themselves can go into albums), or even things like frames.

Consider this your “core collection”.

Focus on getting the coins you have here into a level of display you're happy with. Maybe get them filed online here at Numista. 

4 - With the “Special” coins, some probably filtered into your core collection but now you can decide what to do with the rest of them. Could just have a smaller display section of “cool” coins, or get individual but not display storage.

5 - Have another look through the “Unknown” pile. Hopefully by this time, you'll be very familiar with Numista's search feature so you should be able to clear out many of them. Anything you're truly stuck with, throw some photos & dimensions onto the forums. Someone will probably get back to you.

6 - With the residual coins, you now have choices. You can go with the “they're not important to me, so I can keep them in the bulk storage” route, and not spend any real money on storing them. Obviously over a long period of time, these coins may deteriorate but if they're not important to you, well, no big loss. Personally, this is the route I went with & the savings went into better displays for my important coins.

You could consider selling / swapping them so you can get more for your core collection. Obviously, this takes some time & effort but can be worthwhile.

Or you might decide you want to have a full individual storage for each coin. But by this stage, you'll have some idea of cost (as you'll have looked into the options during your core collection building). You can then use this knowledge to decide if its worth it or not.

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That's the approach I would take. I wouldn't jump straight into individual display storage for everything straight away as the volume of coins will be too large.

Hope that gives you some ideas. Feel free to ask any questions. 🙂

Thank you for all your Input! I found out the pages I have in the album right now are PVC and learned about coin flips, I’ll get some as soon as I can.

thank you for also telling me how to handle such a high volume of coins I don’t know what I was thinking wanting to jump into everything at once I think I’ll start by separating them into countries and keeping a special pile. Once my Saflips arrive I’ll store the nice ones in the album pages but with the flips, I definetly would love to get all egyptian coins.

and the 12 kg are mostly coins from 50-30 years ago when my grandpa was traveling so a lot of them are demonetized I think. Very cool stuff.