What is the Number One Coin of your collection?

Hello,

Well, there's the new thread, “What was the first coin your purchased for your coin collection?”.

And going with the spirit of it I am making a similar question, this time not restricted to purchases. It can be anything, finding somewhere, given to you as gift, or simply bought.

What really matters here is what coin should be considered the coin Number One of your collection.

The one you would put in a dome just like the Number One Dime from the Uncle Scrooge's stories.

I'll start with my Number One coin:

Nothing too fancy, just a japanese 50 yen coin that I've found in the school yard as a small kid. Kept it as a luck charm for the rest of the school years. At that time it was just a strange and holed coin, I only learned of it's identity shortly before creating my Numista account.

My dad gave me his collection that was passed down from his dad. There was nothing uncommon and was only about 250 different coins. I have added so much to the collection since then. I have marked all those first coins as “original” so that i will always know that they are the reason that I became a collector, and will not be replaced.

Quick Slowness

My dad gave me his collection that was passed down from his dad. There was nothing uncommon and was only about 250 different coins. I have added so much to the collection since then. I have marked all those first coins as “original” so that i will always know that they are the reason that I became a collector, and will not be replaced.

Oh wow. I think it's impossible to choose one coin in this case. Probably you would want to put the entire “original lot” in the dome.

When I was quite young, maybe 8 or 9, my grandma gave me a chinese coin that nobody knew that much about. It was quite big so I really enjoyed it for a while, but of course it finally ended up on a shelf to be forgotten.

When I finally rediscovered my interest for coins a while later, I of course set out to find out more about this coin and boy did I!

It turned out to be a junk dollar from 1933, a highly sought after chinese republican coin! 

It was a wonderful experience finding out that this was such an interesting coin and it really kickstarted my collection, but then i started to wonder how my grandma got ahold of this coin?

So I spoke to her about it and it turns out my grandmothers aunt was a missionary in china during the 20s and early 30s, and she inherited and took care of a lot of the things her aunt took home from there. 

This coin is probably the only coin for me that would truly classify as a ”number one dime” since it is a family heirloom.

Also I got it checked at an auction house a while back since these are very often counterfeited and it is real, just probably removed from a mount sometime.

As my kiddie collection got stolen in 2001, I don't have it any more, but I have one coin which is in my main collection that I bought in January 2019 and this is it.  This common date struck me as it was so beautiful and quite cheap.

This 1929 halfcrown of the UK, I bought for like $15 or so and it bought me back into collection big time. I mean I had been dabbling since 2012 with buying and selling online to make a profit, but only keeping common change coins and nothing that meant an investment. I had little money then and could not afford such an expensive hobby.

However by 2019 I was working and had income again and that coin spoke to me over its beauty. Nearly 18 years had passed since I had my kiddie collection stolen and I was ready to resume collecting again. Slowly but surely I started adding to my collection and growth came steady. my partners death in early 2023 saw a massive cash injection and now I have collections that are way out of hand.

However its part of my collection and sits with my other halfcrowns in its own mylar flip between 1928 and 1930 halfcrowns, yet I will never part with this. No domes or lucky dimes though.

Coin & Banknote No. 1

The Isle of Man 1997 TT Races 50p and a 2002 Clydesdale Bank £5.

The 50p my mum gave to me when it turned up in her change after we'd been shopping in Woolworths sometime between 1997 & 2001 (I know I was definitely collecting by 2001, as the 2001 Marconi £2 was my first “special” £2). She just thought I might like it because it had a motorbike on. Not that I was into motorbikes, I was a steam train kind of child but 🤷‍♂️.

The £5 I swapped from a school friend before a school trip to York. I would guess around 2007.

Those really are the first ones too, I've never replaced them and I never intend to either. They don't get any pride of place, they sit exactly where any other version would sit. So no-one would ever suspect them of having more considerable sentimental value.

I have one collection book I call my special collection that has many different pieces in it. Some are older, some acquired with interesting stories, some have interesting designs. My favourite coin is the 1943,44,and 45 Canadian 5 cent pieces. My father was a navigator on a Halifax bomber in world war two so I have an interest in coins of that era. The Canadian coins have an unique history. Nickel was needed for the war effort. The mint decided to change the nickel. They chose a similar design of the British three pence. The metal used was called tombac and the coin changed shape from round to 12 sided. In 42 they stuck with the beaver design. In 43 they changed the design to the V for victory with the torch. Around the edge of the face they put in Morse Code the phrase, "We Win When We Work Willingly". By 1944 they changed the composition again. They were steel with a chromium electroplating. Uncirculated examples are brilliant. I started buying an example at every local show I went to so I now have a number of them. The Chromium was thin so circulating coins tend to be rusted. Mint strike coins shimmer. Their history and their beauty make them the number one coin in my collection. They are not unreasonably expensive still.

The mint made a token for some war remembrance events of the same design in recent years.

To reply to this thread I had to change my password    :D

For me, two are the number "one" coins: the common Hungarian 20 filler 1968 and the Yugoslavian 1 dinar 1965

I was so young when I received them, perhaps from a relative, that I don't even remember, but I remember that I jealously kept them in a little box.

At the time there was the Cold War and I imagined what those coins could represent for those people, maybe they had been used by another child to buy an ice cream or a toy….