Searching for Pedigree in Auctions

[Prieure de Sion]

Good evening 😉 

I am currently enjoying collecting coins that have a story behind the story. Perhaps some of you will remember my Trajan thread - a coin sold by the coin dealer LL Hamburger in 1936. I was fascinated by the background to this sale in 1936 and I am still researching the Jewish owners of the coin shop and Germany under the NSDAP.

I would like to expand my collection a little and look for coins with a pedigree in the upcoming auctions. Of course, not every coin offered with a pedigree will also have a pedigree that is of interest to me.

But first I would have to search the mass of auctions for coins for which a pedigree is given at all. At the moment I have to open all auctions, all individual coins and above all each description individually - a pedigree could have been submitted.

But this is of course very cumbersome and takes a lot of time. That's why I use search terms on Numisbids, Sixbid and Biddr.
 
„Pedigree“
“Collection“
“Sammlung“

But the last two search terms in particular give me imprecise results - I then get almost all coins displayed.

Is there a tip or trick for searching? Does anyone specifically look for certain pedigrees in auctions? Or are you rather looking for specific coins and an interesting pedigree is then more of a random nice to have?

[Hesiod]

Best way is to build or have access to a photo file. Your method is looking for pedigrees others have found and then forgotten which is on the rare side for better firms as they'll look for prior listings of a coin on the search engines

[shanxi]

Many dealers just write e.g. "ex Prieure de Sion" without using Pedigree, Collection or Sammlung.

Therefore you can just search for "ex" or "ex ". This works somehow fur Numisbids and sixbid with an acceptable number of unwanted results but not for biddr which shows too many bad results like e.g. REX.

 

On acsearch  "ex" works quite well but it's not for upcoming auctions, and of course this brings also results like "in ex", but usually not longer words like "extremely"

Edited December 24, 2023 by shanxi

[Prieure de Sion]

1 hour ago, shanxi said:

Many dealers just write e.g. "ex Prieure de Sion" without using Pedigree, Collection or Sammlung.

Therefore you can just search for "ex" or "ex ". This works somehow fur Numisbids and sixbid with an acceptable number of unwanted results but not for biddr which shows too many bad results like e.g. REX.

Ah, I can't see the tree because there's too much forest!

Ex! The magic word. Ok - it will give me a lot of nonsensical hits - but that's often the case.

Have you ever looked for Nero? Things are going relatively well with Numisbids - but Biddr also gives me all sorts of things that have something to do with black at Nero.
 
OK. Then of course I'll have to try out Ex and bring some time with me.

But I couldn't think of any other options besides the search terms. There are probably no other options.

[Ocatarinetabellatchitchix]

Some Auction houses also use the word « provenance ».

[John Conduitt]

4 hours ago, Ocatarinetabellatchitchix said:

Some Auction houses also use the word « provenance ».

Yes much more than pedigree. Perhaps less than Ex but you would need to search for both. I would search for “Ex.”, “Ex “ or “ Ex “ (with dot or spaces) rather than “Ex”.

I collect coins from hoards and search for ‘hoard’. But even this has been ruined by Stacks Bowers, who insist on giving every single Roman coin a meaningless rarity rating based on the number of examples found in the Reka Devnia hoard. This annoying note has stopped me even looking at Stacks auctions. But now it appears everywhere, since other auctions just copy and paste the Stacks description when they resell a coin. At least it tells you Stacks once sold it, so that’s a plus for provenance research.

Edited December 24, 2023 by John Conduitt

[DonnaML]

At least on Numisbids, if you do a combined search for "Ex" and "Collection," or "Ex" and "Sammlung," most of the search results will be relevant. Too bad there's no capacity on most of these sites to do a Boolean or proximity search (something I first learned to do for computerized legal research in the Lexis database in 1977, while I was in law school!), which would be useful to narrow things down even further.

[Prieure de Sion]

On 12/24/2023 at 5:43 PM, John Conduitt said:

Yes much more than pedigree. Perhaps less than Ex but you would need to search for both. I would search for “Ex.”, “Ex “ or “ Ex “ (with dot or spaces) rather than “Ex”.

I collect coins from hoards and search for ‘hoard’. But even this has been ruined by Stacks Bowers, who insist on giving every single Roman coin a meaningless rarity rating based on the number of examples found in the Reka Devnia hoard. This annoying note has stopped me even looking at Stacks auctions. But now it appears everywhere, since other auctions just copy and paste the Stacks description when they resell a coin. At least it tells you Stacks once sold it, so that’s a plus for provenance research.

Great idea… ex works at Numisbids great. I use now „Ex „ with space or „Ex. „ with dot.
So I get the most hits. 

[DonnaML]

4 hours ago, Prieure de Sion said:

Great idea… ex works at Numisbids great. I use now „Ex „ with space or „Ex. „ with dot.
So I get the most hits. 

How does leaving a space help?

[Prieure de Sion]

7 hours ago, DonnaML said:

How does leaving a space help?

I have the feeling that the space helps me in Numisbids to differentiate - as an example - between:

"Ex Max Mustermann Collection"

and

"ROMA in Exergue"