Military Medal Collection
GUEST:
My father had been collecting for about 50 years and he's passed away about ten years ago. And it's been in storage at my son's house for about the ten years.
APPRAISER:
It's actually quite a nice collection, and I'd want to also say this-- that there's another frame of these, and we just didn't have enough room to show all of them. I think we counted about 141 medals altogether.
GUEST:
Oh, okay.
APPRAISER:
And, um... you had a couple of questions.
GUEST:
Yes, the ribbon and the medals that you have on your side that look like this one, um... I noticed that there were 12 bars here.
APPRAISER:
Okay, what these are, these are World War I Victory Medals. All the Allied nations gave these to American troops. Each nation gave a different version of them. They were given after the victory in World War I, and what these bars represent are different campaigns that the man took part in. These are actually navy versions; the navy bar is a little bit different. And I've never seen any with this many bars-- it's very unusual. But these are all things that he participated in. Medals have really, in the past few years in the collector community, have gone through the roof price-wise. There's a tremendous amount of interest in them, especially the campaign medals. And you've got a lot of campaign... American military campaign medals here. Campaign medals were done after the fact, after a war, sometimes many years after the war, to commemorate the soldier's participation. You've got the Civil War campaign medal. These were given out at the turn of the last century to men that had been involved in the Civil War. This is the Sampson Medal. This was given in the Spanish-American War. You've got some of the more common medals. The World War II campaign medals, the Pacific Theater. And then this is a World War II Distinguished Service Cross, which is a fairly rare medal. It's only second to the Congressional Medal of Honor. So it's a very nice, well-rounded collection. Everything is in very good condition, it's nicely displayed and, um... Do you have any idea of what the value of this might be?
GUEST:
I have no idea.
APPRAISER:
Okay, well, some of these medals are as little as ten dollars apiece, but there're some worth hundreds of dollars. So when they're named and numbered they're worth more. Without sitting down and really figuring each medal-- just giving you a ballpark on it-- between the two cases, you probably have between $5,000 and $8,000 worth of medals.
GUEST:
Oh, my gosh.
APPRAISER:
It's a considerable amount.
Appraisal Details
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