An engraved Seated Liberty silver half dollar has been reunited with the family of the man who is honored on the piece, more than 120 years after it was made.

Collector Jay DeBoer of Olympia, Washington, bought the coin during a Northwest Tokens and Medals show Feb. 20. He quickly set about sleuthing to determine the story behind the carving on the coin’s obverse, which obliterated the design.

The host coin for the engraved piece of numismatic folk art appears to date to 1843 or 1844, according to experts contacted by Coin World who reviewed an image of the reverse.

The obverse features an inscription that reads EARL MCMAHAN / BORN / SEPT. 21, 1886 / ALBANY, ILL. / DIED / MAY 16, 1901 / LANSING, IOWA, indicating the individual honored was only 14 years old at the time of his death. 

McMahan is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Lansing Township, Iowa, DeBoer would find out, thanks to online genealogical resources. How the coin journeyed from Iowa to Washington State may remain a mystery for the ages.

How DeBoer learned the story behind the man on the piece, however, is an object lesson for collectors and researchers alike.

Finding the coin

Having been a collector on and off since he was a kid, the 56-year-old DeBoer became a hobo nickel carver in January of 2012, and his interest in carved coins really blossomed, leading him to create jayhobo.com.

DeBoer bought the coin from dealer Lynda Haight, who operates A Coin Shop LLC in Silverdale, Washington, with her husband Marty Shallow.

The NWTAMS show was the third show in nearly as many weeks that DeBoer had attended where he saw Haight and Shallow, buying trade tokens from Haight each time. DeBoer saved their table for last, “because I knew I’d be spending some time at her table,” he said in a post to the Original Hobo Nickel Society’s Facebook group.

About halfway through the couple’s 10 binders of tokens, he found the coin under discussion.

The hand-engraved piece struck him, and though he looked at the coin and moved on to look at other items in the binders, he said, “I kept going back to this coin.”

“So many questions passed through my head while looking at this coin,” wrote DeBoer. “Who commissioned this coin? Was it the father or the mother? Perhaps the brother? ... Those questions will never be answered, but if we had all the answers would the art of coin collecting be as exciting?”

Dealer Shallow said the shop has had the coin for about 11 or 12 years, after it just “walked into our doors.”

Limited demand for engraved pieces among his clientele meant the item remained available for DeBoer to stumble upon it.

Finding the family

The abundance of dates relating to McMahan’s life was critical for learning more, DeBoer said.

“In the genealogy world that is the golden ticket to have that much information on an individual,” he wrote. “I was thinking with all that information on the coin I could surely find this guy on Ancestry.[com].”

“I have a lot of projects going on all the time and I wondered if I wanted to take on a new one which I really didn’t have the time for. As soon as the thought of putting the coin back entered my head I realized that if I put it back the chance of this coin ever seeing a family member was probably going to be zero ... so I decided I needed to purchase [it].”

When he got home, DeBoer assumed that it would be easy to find information about the coin’s subject. Interpreting the name as Carl McMahan, though, sent him down the wrong path.

“I checked record after record. Some were quite obvious it wasn’t a match but the ones that the names matched perfectly, none of the dates would match and I was starting to lose hope of finding this guy,” he wrote. “I gave Ancestry a rest and was examining the engraving on the coin when I remembered Find-A-Grave. I went to their website and typed in Carl McMahan with a birth year of 1886 and a dead year of 1901 and hit enter. No results.”

His search remained fruitless until he omitted the first name and finally found results for Earl McMahan.

“Ah ha, it wasn’t “Carl” after all — it was Earl, and there was a photo of his headstone.”

Everything matched except the date of death. The coin reads “May sixteenth” where his headstone reads ‘May 15th.’”

One day is not a big deal in the realm of genealogy research, since records are all over the place with different information.

DeBoer offered several scenarios that could explain the difference of a date, including the fact the headstone might have been commissioned much later after the death, at which point the date was misremembered.

The artists could have made the mistake — the script on the piece looks more like Carl than Earl, DeBoer said, so perhaps the date was another mistake.

Armed with the correct information, DeBoer returned to Ancestry and soon found four family members linked to McMahan’s online record.

“Once I confirmed Earl was on each of those family trees I sent a message to each owner of those trees explaining that I had acquired a coin with their relative’s name on it at a coin show and if they were interested in the coin to contact me,” wrote DeBoer.

Someone finally responded.

“She said her grandmother was Earl’s sister,” according to DeBoer. “She later told me that Earl was accidentally shot by his brother.”

The woman lives an hour away from DeBoer, who offered the coin to her for his purchase price, $40, plus $5 shipping.

“I’m a little sad to see this beautiful coin leave my hands but also excited for it to be returning home to Earl’s relatives,” he wrote.

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