So I've been counting pennies tonight. Quite a while ago I signed up to be a volunteer for the Cent Project. An effort to get a picture of cents in circulation around the country. Volunteers bought $50 worth of circulated cents at banks and counted it, sorting mints and varieties, then turned in their data for publication at the project's website http://www.thecentproject.com/ .

At least that is how it is supposed to work. 5000 cents is a lot to sort by year and count. (I had to hit 2 banks to get that many too) I got as far as a preliminary sort by the last digit of the date. Judging by the lack of updates to the website I am not alone! Seriously, I have no idea if this project went forward at all, but there are no new posts since the count was declared on.

So tonight I started on my bag of nines. I found 1959, 1969, 1979, 1989 and 1999. No surprises here, the smallest group was the '59s and the largest the 99's (I bought the coins in December of 2007 so no 09's.) I also was pleased to note a couple of 1919s (P & D) and the real surprise, a 1889 Indian Head! So far I've only sorted the 16 1959 cents into 13 P and 3 D. I'm saving the larger amounts for later. Eventually I will mail in my counts if anyone is collecting them anymore, and in the meantime, I will publish them here.