Project Update

Project Update

We started sorting our two stamp collections in September 2016.  I am going to briefly tell you what we have managed to achieve during the last 8 years.

When we started, we really did not know where to begin.  Our son Carl suggested creating a website and placing our stamps and covers on the website.  He did the technical stuff and then taught us how to carry on. Because there were so many stamps, it was difficult to know where to begin, so we first started with the books where stamps had been stuck in.  There were quite a lot of these books.

This stamp from Sicily has a very high value in the Stanley Gibbons catalogue.  Unfortunately as there were many forgeries of the stamps of 1867 of King Bomba, we do not know whether this stamp actually has value, but it is always an interesting talking point.

 

 

 

 

When we finished scanning, cataloguing, identifying, cropping and uploading these stamps, we were faced with boxes of loose stamps.  Lack of a dedicated space (or room) meant that it was impossible to sort the stamps into countries at that point.  So we took a box at a time, sorted the stamps into countries, then placed them into albums, scanned, catalogued, cropped and uploaded the stamps onto the website.  By this time we had 16 albums filled with stamps.  Although we had been faced with a mammoth task, I think we managed to think the situation through and to have a system whereby it has been easy to locate any stamp that is on the website within a minute or two.

This stamp from Costa Rica is dated 1863 and has a Stanley Gibbons catalogue number of 1.

 

 

 

 

 

Although there were many boxes of stamps still to be attended to, we decided to take a break from the stamps and spend time on the covers.  By the time these covers were on the website, there were a further 31 albums.  We have a cupboard totally dedicated to the storage of these stamps and albums. In this cupboard, there are more than 40 000 stamps from 410 countries or territories and 2489 First Day and Other Covers from 110 countries or territories.

Looking forward, we still have a few boxes of stamps from various countries to be sorted and then we will tackle the last boxes which contain stamps of our own country, South Africa.  This will be a massive project on its own and if Willy doesn’t bring home too many stamps or covers in the meantime, our project might be coming to an end in a few years time.