Great Grandfather's US Stamp Collection

Hello all,

my family has held onto my great grandfather's stamp collection ever since he died in 1974 that was kept in a single album. I know he had some additional stamps that either are hiding in a shoe box or were given to some extended family in the past, but this book contains the majority of his work and passion.

I was given the album by my grandparents this week as they were visiting from Indiana, and this is the first time I have seriously started looking into his stamps (I'm 26 now). Looking into some online sites, I think there are some pretty interesting stamps I would like to share. My goal is not to sell them.

I understand I am a new user with less than 50 posts, and I have figured out how to unbind the album to individually scan sheets containing the stamps. I would like to request permission to insert a google drive linked 35MB pdf that contains around 15 pages of stamps starting from 1845 (9X1 Postmaster) to circa 1900. I also have scans of his receipts for many stamps I also want to share as two files.

I'm happy to hear that, as your great grandfather clearly loved his stamps.
From what you've already posted, you will have a very nice collection to get started with and to learn from.

We look forward to seeing more of it.

Yes, he was pretty thorough for many of the series through the 1960's. There are a few stamps he's missing, but I think I can get them without too much difficulty.

Looking into rules more, I don't believe Google drive is allowed for permissible sharing here. I will figure out a way to either compress the file or convert them to an image file then upload them directly here

The image optimizer that is available when you switch to "full reply" is very easy to use and very powerful. See if that doesn't help

What a great post and story! Welcome! I collected stamps as a boy and then restarted when I retired about five years ago. I also inherited a couple generations worth of family material. It has taken me little bit of time and trial and error to come up to speed with how things are done today (e.g. old crystal mounts from the 60s are bad - throw them away).

This forum has been a great help. I rarely have to post a question and spend most of my time just searching through the older threads. There's another one going on right now talking about perforations - the difference between pulled perfs and short perfs - I never understood either before.

My advice is take your time before you commit to doing this or that - like do you want to add stamps that you collect to this original album or start one of your own?

And as others have said it would be great to see an image of a at least a page or two. Maybe start with the oldest material. That way people can see what the album is, whether the pages are up to snuff in terms of being archival and for long term preservation of the stamps.

Good luck!

I'm on the road right now as a passenger, so I can't process the pdf to images until I get home. In the meanwhile you can see the photos I took prior to me scanning the pages in my introduction post here. The scan is much higher quality.

https://www.stampcommunity.org/?TOPIC_ID=87014

I'm planning to take this slowly so I don't end up making any big financial mistakes. Right now there's a few stamps I noticed missing in the album that I'm seeing how feasible it will be to acquire. Long term is still TBD for what I think will be interesting to focus on.

Wow - you've got some good stuff there. Definitely take your time with this.

Here's the first few scanned pages but reduced to the file size limit. I think one of the green washingtons on sheet one is a cut 35 but don't know 100%.

Way better than the typical inherited collection.
A lot of duplication. Once you really get your feet under you and fully understand what you have, you could consider whether you want to sell off some of the dups to finance filling in some of the holes. Personally I would keep some of the dups (certain cancels) but not all of them

There are a lot of nice cancellations in there. That's one of many reasons to collect multiples of a single issue.

Welcome.

What a splendid jumpstart collection. As others have observed, there are some nice cancellations, and in quite a few cases good centering, and many examples to sort through and possibly sell some to finance filling the lacunae you have.
Take your time and above all, enjoy.

Also some quite noticeable shades.

Were some 1869 issues produced as imperfs?

The imperf 1869s appear to be P4 card proofs to me.

I was curious about those imperf stamps, but that answered my question.

I hope overall I can keep the collection complete. I haven't settled yet on what I could focus on for stamps, but I really like the variety of cancels I've seen so far rather than having a mint stamp

Would agree with Txstamp. Would keep that set together, attractive set. That is something that I'd have mounted and framed.

I went to the nearest philatelic club near me, the Rhode Island Philatelic Society, that happened to be having the monthly meeting today. They were extremelly nice considering I appeared for the first time and were very excited to see the collection. The passion and knowledge from that little group alone was incredible, and cements my belief that this album should not be sold and kept in the family. The reaction they were giving that can only be seen in person and not just words on a forum is making me start to realize the significance of what my great grandfather has achieved.

The society gave me what I think is a good path forward if I do intend to keep collection. I will be devouring a Scotts catalog soon and seeing what I can attempt to at least vaguely identify important and interesting stamps, then consider certification for insurance purposes (even if it may cost some money up front due to percentage fees).

I also was given advice on approaches to best preserving the stamps based on whether I wanted to keep the arranged sheets original in the Scotts album, or going full preservation with a modern album setup instead. Storage is also being taken into consideration too due to apparent value of the collection (also environment/temp and humidity reasons too).