My collecting journey began in 2019. I started off collecting U.S. coins after spending time with my grandfather and his collection. I was fascinated by how old some of my grandfather’s coins were. I remember seeing a Carson City Morgan Dollar and was in awe seeing a coin that was over 125 years old.
Since I was a high school student working as a delivery boy for a local flower shop, I did not have much money to spend on coins. Another barrier to me beginning my collection is that in my small town of roughly five thousand people, there were no local coin shops in my area. Because of my lack of money and coin shops, I had to resort to coin roll hunting. Coin roll hunting allowed me to get my coin fix by going to local banks and asking for various amounts of cents or nickels. I had ordered a couple of Whitman folders for cents and nickels in hopes of being able to slowly fill them by coin roll hunting.
I was able to make a decent dent in my albums (finding multiple war nickels and older wheat cents) over the year, and then my interests began to shift. As I had been saving up money from my flower shop job, I began to crave something more than cents and nickels, I wanted a silver dollar. I began researching more into silver dollars and decided that I wanted to find a nice circulated example of both a Morgan and Peace dollar. I was able to get my fix from a couple of local pawn shops in the next town over, despite slightly overpaying.
I absolutely admired my first two silver dollars and I still have them today. Acquiring these coins further opened the door for me to grow my collection.
I graduated high school in 2019 and moved about 3 hours away to go to college. During my first semester of college, my collecting had become dormant. However, after getting used to how classes work in college, I was able to settle into a routine and get back to collecting. Now being in a fairly large city, I decided I would search the internet to see if there were any coin shops nearby. Low and behold, there was a small coin shop about 15 minutes away from campus and another medium-sized shop about 30 minutes away. I was in heaven.
For the next year, I would spend nearly every afternoon hanging out in my local coin shop. On the days they were open, I would go hang out from the time I got out of class to the time the shop closed. I grew relationships with the older gentleman and his wife that owned the shop. He would bring in coins out of his personal collection to show me from time to time. His collection was incredible and full of rare U.S. coins from 18th century coins to high grade gold. His collection was another inspiration for me and my growing collection.
Sometime in 2020, my collecting interests did a complete flip-flop. Up until that point, I had been collecting solely U.S. coins and was attempting to fill an American Silver Eagle Dansco Album. However, as my local coin shop began showing me the binders full of world coins they had, something in my mind flicked a switch and from then on, I had a burning passion for world coins. Around this time, I also began to be interested in graded coins.
I spent a long time in limbo trying to find my niche in the world coin arena. I was doing a lot of research into which countries I was most interested in based on their history and coin designs. I jumped back and forth with several countries from Europe to South America to Asia. After a long time of jumping back and forth, I discovered Austria. I researched Austrian history and coinage and another flip switched in my mind. Austria was going to be my niche, I had instantly fallen in love with the designs of Austrian coinage and how far back their history goes.
As we fast forward a while, my collection broadened to a few European countries: Austria, Germany, and Netherlands. I was shopping online and visiting my local coin shops frequently and my collection exponentially grew. I was into both raw and graded coins. I loved PCGS trueviews and tried to especially acquire coins that had trueview images. Around this time is when I discovered the PCGS Set Registry and started sending my coins in to be graded.
Fast forward again to today and I have been collecting Germany, Austrian, and Netherlands coinage for two or two and a half years and have never looked back. I am currently trying to assemble a few PCGS registry sets as well as trying to build a top pop Austrian type set. I have been getting more and more into submitting raw coins to be graded targeting top pops.
I have decided to make a website to showcase my humble collection in a fully personalizable way. So as you continue browsing around my site, I hope you enjoy looking at my collection as it grows. I also hope that you might reach out to me via email or social media. I would love to speak to other numismatists in hopes of building as many relationships as I can with like-minded people.
Thank you for spending your time reading and learning more about the collector behind this website!
Happy Collecting!
-Dalton J. Wilson
The DJW Numismatics Gallery 