What cards does my family need to know about?

The problem is not value. It is memory.

A serious collection is usually understood by exactly one person. Which card is the good one. Which is worth more than it looks. Which was bought the week a first child was born, and should never be sold whatever it is worth.

None of that is written anywhere. And when it is needed — and it is always needed at the worst possible moment — the people who need it are the least equipped to work it out. What tends to happen next is that a family accepts the first offer from the first dealer through the door, because they have no way to know whether it is a fair one.

A written record does not prevent that by being clever. It prevents it by existing.

What we make

Two things. A Portrait is a piece — one card, written to be framed. A Record is a ledger — the whole collection, written to be filed. They cost about the same per card; a Record simply has more of them.

• The Portrait

  One card, documented in full: the story of the player and the set, the grade register, and the verified record of what it has traded for at public auction. Printed on archival stock and ready to frame. For a child’s first card we leave a panel blank for an autograph.
  $185or three for $450
• The Record

  An entire collection, in one document. What you own, where each piece is, what grade it carries, what the market has paid for it, and who your family should call. Priced by how many cards you document, and refreshed once a year so it does not go stale in a drawer.
  from $950see the table below

More than twenty-five cards is a larger piece of work than we can promise to turn around well right now, so we have not priced it. Ask, and we will tell you honestly when we can take it on.

Read a finished one before you order

A complete example, on a card from our own collection — a 1933 Goudey #144 Babe Ruth in PSA 2. Its record is drawn from 301 verified auction sales, and the last page is blank because that half is written by hand.

The Portrait — four pages PDFThe Plate — the sheet that gets framed PDF

Not a mock-up. This is the document, exactly as it is sent.

How it works

1. You fill in the form
   One card per line: the year, the set, the player, the grade. If a card is graded, the certificate number alone is enough and we will look up the rest. It takes a few minutes — we do not ask you to write anything personal into a web form. No call and no appointment.
2. We do the research
   We assemble the public auction record, the grade register, and the history. Where a card has no public record, we say so plainly rather than inventing a number.
3. It arrives as an object
   Printed on archival stock, and a digital copy for your records. Yours to frame, to file with your will, or to hand to someone.
4. You write the last page yourself
   The final page asks the questions we cannot answer for you. Where you got it. What you paid, and whether that felt like a lot at the time. Who you called afterwards. It arrives blank and ruled, because in fifty years the handwriting will matter more than the record does. Answer the ones you want, leave the rest, and add anything we did not think to ask. If you would rather we set your answers in type, we will.

What this is not

Worth being exact about, because the difference matters and it is easy to blur.

• This is not an appraisal. We are not appraisers and we do not issue appraisals. We document what a card is and what the public record shows it has traded for. If you need a formal appraisal for a tax filing or a legal matter, you need a qualified appraiser, and we will happily say so.
• This is not investment advice. Nothing we write is a recommendation to buy, hold or sell anything. We describe what has happened, never what will.
• We do not buy your cards, and we do not broker them. We have no interest in what you decide to do with a collection, which is precisely what lets us describe it honestly.
• We will not invent a number. Where a card has no public auction record, we write its story and say plainly that its market cannot be documented. A range we cannot source is worse than no range at all.

Who writes these

The Heirloom Index is written by Gregory S. Ostrowski — a Certified Financial Planner™ professional, and a collector at this end of the market for most of his life. The combination is the reason this exists: the questions a family actually has when a collection changes hands are half hobby and half financial, and they are almost never asked of the same person.

The index, the market data, the writing — that is the same research a Portrait is built from. We do it on the most famous cards in the hobby, in the open and against sales anyone can look up, so you can judge the work before you commission any of it.