Last Friday we got word that one of my great aunts had died, so on Tuesday I went along to her funeral. She’d lived a long and happy life, only learning a few weeks ago that leukemia was going to get the best of her. But, despite the somber occasion, it was nice to see my fringe relatives and old family friends.
All three of my dad’s sisters accompanied us to the funeral, with one of them flying in from Arizona. So Mom took the opportunity to pull out the remaining things from my grandparents to divvy up.
Most of it was junk, in my humble opinion.
But there was about $300 in coins that Grandma had once buried inside the machine shed when they were going on vacation. Why? Who knows. But there they sat on the kitchen counter, equally divided by coin type and date in four cottage cheese containers. There were a ton of silver dollars from the 1970s.
But the pennies. OMG. An entire big coffee can FULL of old pennies that hadn’t yet been touched. My aunts were in favor of sorting out the ones with wheat backs and then sending the rest through the coin counting machine.
So after the aunts had left, my parents and Mr. Farmer and I got sucked into sorting them — at 9 p.m., when we should’ve been thinking about going to bed or watching bad reality TV or something. Mom and Dad separated the wheat from the chaff, and Farmer and I sorted them by decade. Well, I sorted them by decade and Farmer diligently sorted them by year. We’re still not done.
We had tons from the 30s-50s, and the earliest one we found was 1912. They have a little bit of value, but so far we haven’t hit the motherload:
•1909-S V.D.B. ($700-$2000+)
•1909-S ($100-$500+)
•1914-D ($225-$3,500+)
•1922 no mint mark ($650-$40,000+)
•1931-S ($115-$250+)
•1955 Doubled-Die ($950-$5,000+)
Most of them are just worth, well, pennies.
P.S. Is it just me, or is it funny that there’s an article in the local paper that says the “birthday group got together this month, even though there weren’t any birthdays”?
