Help. Inherited Father's Stamp Collection.

I have inherited my father's stamp collection. It is easily 50 years old. Nothing new added to it for at least 30 years. He was a US postal worker and my understanding is he had access to purchasing new issues, etc. I am not interested in picking up or continuing collecting.I have no idea what to do, how to handle, where to go for help. I do want to treat his efforts with the utmost of respect. I would greatly appreciate expert help. To complicate things, I am not familiar with how a forum operates. Please be patient with me.
Respectfully,
. Gale

Welcome !

See this section

http://goscf.com/f/57

Hi Gale,

I hope you have a lot of fun and make new friends!

Cheers

Laurie

Gale,

I would suggest that you give serious thought to what you want to do with it.

- Continue the collection (now or in the future) - I know you said you weren't interested...
- Sell it
- Donate it
- Give it to another family member or friend that will appreciate and continue it. (Now or in the future)

The answer to this may or may not involve knowing the collections monetary value. Value is a funny thing when talking about collecting stamps... there are really several values that you can assign to the same collection. Catalog value can be used as a water mark but it's not always going to give an accurate street value. Catalog value can potentially be used for tax deduction and insurance purposes. Sentimental value is another factor and hard to define or justify to anyone else.

Selling stamps is also tricky. The more effort you put into breaking it down and time you spend on it will bring better prices. Selling as a lot is much quicker but will bring less in. It can be a sliding scale to some extent.

To sell you're probably going to want to know exactly what you have. I'd ask around your circle of friends and see if anyone knows a collector that can help you catalog what you have. Did your father belong to any local clubs? They may be able to help. Just tell them you're not sure what you want to do with them but need to know what you have possibly for insurance or to understand the value for a gift to a relative...

Can you describe the collection - How big? Any idea what the age of the earliest stamp are? if on pages they may give the years? Is it one album? Are the stamps in envelopes or something like that? Loose in a box? Are they singles, new, used, sheets?

If all else fails you could potentially post some photos here and the community could possibly give you an idea although exact identification of some issues may be hard or impossible from a photo but those too can be pointed out. The photo would need to be a pretty decent quality depending on the stamp issue there are guidelines for photo size here. 200kb max and it's pretty user friendly but help is available if you need it.

Not to be a downer but... In my experience, an inherited stamp collection is rarely worth what the new owner thinks it is. But you don't know until it's cataloged.

Well this is kind of a start to get you thinking anyways.

Hope this helped...
Jeff