Coin Collecting and Genealogy: Rebuilding my Grandfather’s Coin Collection

Some of what follows is conjecture. All is subject to the imperfections of my memory, but the whole of it is truth, at least as well as I know it. As the title implies, it has a little bit of genealogy in it, but that’s not my main interest. We are all related, and although written records only go back a small number of years, you and I both have common ancestors not so very long ago. Does it matter if a distant relative of mine was famous? It does not mean much to me. What matters to me is the small trove of United States coins I inherited from my paternal grandfather, Beardsley Lawrence.

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