Coin Buyers Serving Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, PA

Chestnut Hill sits at the top of Germantown Avenue in the city's northwest corner, and its stone houses, many of them built from local Wissahickon schist, tend to stay in families. A house that has been home to three generations does not get emptied in a weekend, and coins are often the last thing anyone finds: a velvet-lined case in a desk drawer, or gold pieces wrapped in a handkerchief at the back of a dresser.

U.S. gold coins circulated until 1933, and Chestnut Hill estates often still hold a few from those years. Liberty and Saint-Gaudens double eagles, $10 eagles and $5 half eagles are all 90% gold, and a $20 double eagle holds 0.9675 troy ounces. Smaller $2.50 quarter eagles and $1 gold pieces turn up as well, sometimes still in the little envelopes they were given in. Date, mint mark and grade can lift a coin well past its melt value, though, so we sort the gold by collector interest first and only then weigh what is left as metal.

Old-line households here also kept paper. Large-size notes from before 1929, red seal United States Notes and National Bank Notes printed with the names of Philadelphia banks come out of family Bibles and lockboxes. Those bank notes draw regional collectors, so we read the bank name and charter number on each one. Silver certificates are redeemable only at face value today, but condition and the star on a replacement note can make some of them worth more.

Down the avenue in Mount Airy, the houses run to big stone twins and Victorian singles, and the collections tend to be a lifetime's hobby. We see Indian Head cents in blue folders, Mercury dimes, and Lincoln cent albums with a few empty holes where the hard dates never turned up. Albums like these are worth going through one hole at a time, because one better date can outweigh the rest of the page.

Estate work in this part of the city usually involves several relatives and sometimes an executor or attorney, and a written, item-by-item list lets everyone look at the same numbers. The meeting is set when you book, and for a full estate you can ask about a home visit so nothing has to leave the house until the family decides. If the coins are spread through several rooms, we can work through them one room at a time. Nobody is asked to accept an offer on the spot.