Affordable bits of history and a premise.

As most of you probably know I'm trying to collect Mint Sets for the birth years of my ancestors. A daunting project to say the least, but I was elated to discover that many of the coins I need are readily available if I lower my expectations a tad. Case in point, I bought this 1829 half for less than $500 and it is a beaut! Sure it would be nice to have a MS-63 or so but with a wishlist still hovering around 500 coins, I would run out of moola way too quickly. My premise is, however, that unless demand for these almost 200 year old coins in lower grades goes up, I'm not likely going to see a great amount of appreciation price wise.

A word of explanation on the prevalence of PCGS coins in my NGC Registry sets; I called and requested Mint Set years prior to 1837 and was informed by NGC that there was not enough interest to warrant providing other mint set years. Not so at PCGS! I now have the #1 ranked sets of 1829, 1818, and 1813. True I only have one or two coins of each year, but they are named after my distant relatives and I will be able to complete them.

For those of you who have never visited the PCGS web site, I would suggest you take a look. The other day I was researching the All-Time Highest Ranked Sets and ran into most of the famous names associated with numismatics. One of which was William Dunham. If you are so inclined look up his collection under the 1818 Mint Set, click on his name and check out the prices he sold his coins for in June 1941 to B. Max Mehl. Click on 'About the William Dunham Collection' tab and get a thumbnail description of the man and his coins. The same can be done for about every famous collector you have ever heard of and some you haven't. Don't misunderstand, I enjoy being a member of NGC and would certainly miss the friends I have here if NGC was to disallow PCGS graded coins. My hat is off to NGC for their 'user friendly' Registry policies.

As always,best of luck with your collecting pursuits,

Dan