The Morgan That Nobody Can Find

You have a 1921-D Morgan dollar. You know you have it. It is in a 2x2 flip somewhere in the collection. When someone at the coin club asks if you have a date-D for their Peace dollar type set, you need thirty seconds and a search, not a forty-five-minute inspection of every drawer in the cabinet.

A coin collection that exists only in physical form — boxes of flips, albums, tubes — cannot be searched. It can only be inspected. At two hundred pieces that is inconvenient. At two thousand it is unworkable.

Variety as the First Classification Layer

The Variety field organizes the US series history in the correct collecting sequence: Indian Head cents before Lincoln Wheats before Lincoln Memorials; Buffalo nickels before Jeffersons; Mercury dimes before Roosevelts; Barber quarters before Standing Libertys before Washingtons; Walking Liberty halves before Franklins before Kennedys; Morgan dollars before Peace dollars before Eisenhowers.

These varieties are not interchangeable within a denomination. A complete Lincoln cent type set requires an example of each reverse design (Wheat, Memorial, and the Shield reverse after 2010). A collector building a type set by variety can filter the database by denomination and see immediately which varieties are represented and which are gaps.

The Mint field — P (Philadelphia), D (Denver), S (San Francisco), O (New Orleans) — is the mint mark dimension that turns a single variety into multiple catalog entries. A 1893-S Morgan dollar at the San Francisco Mint is one of the rarest US coins in existence. The same date from Philadelphia is common. The mint mark is not a detail; it is the identification that determines whether a coin is worth face value or five figures.

Year and Current Value as the Working Data

Year as an integer is the date field that drives the most basic numismatic filter: show me all my Lincolns from before 1940, which gets you to the wheat cent era without touching the memorial cents. Show me all my Washington quarters from 1932 to 1964, which gets you to the silver era. The integer year field sorts naturally and filters cleanly in a way that a free-text date field does not.

Current Value in USD is the field that requires the most maintenance discipline of any field in the database. Coin values move significantly with silver spot price, with auction results for key dates, and with series-specific collector activity. A Mercury dime collection that was valued at one point may have changed substantially if silver moved. Keeping Current Value updated — even to the nearest Red Book or PCGS Price Guide value rather than the precise current market — gives you an insurance baseline and a collection value summary without a formal appraisal.

The gap between Current Value and what you paid is not tracked by a dedicated Price Paid field in this template — it lives in the Notes or other field. This is a template that prioritizes identification and current valuation over acquisition history, which is the right choice for collectors who buy at market rather than at estate sale pricing where the acquisition discount is the interesting number.

Quality, Grade, and the Space Between Them

The Quality rating field (1-5 stars) is a collector's personal assessment rather than a PCGS or NGC numeric grade. A coin that grades Fine-15 on the Sheldon scale might rate 2 stars for a collector who only keeps coins that grade VF or better. A coin that grades MS-64 might rate 4 stars if the strike quality is weak even though the technical grade is high. The personal assessment is useful for collection management decisions — identifying pieces you want to upgrade — in a way that a standardized numeric grade is not.

Professional third-party grading (PCGS, NGC, ANACS) would be captured in the Notes field, along with slab certification numbers, VAM attribution for Morgan dollar varieties, and any provenance information that affects the coin's story or value.