Searching through coin rolls can be a good source of silver. Since coin sorting machines use technology to identify non-US coins by weight and size, machine wrapped coins tend to have very few silver coins in them - if any. I’ve found luck searching through hand-wrapped coin rolls that sometimes show up at my local bank branch.

A quick way to identify silver (or non-US) coins is by looking at the edge of the coins in a stack. Silver coins are the same color across the entire edge where non-silver coins are silver colored on the rim and copper colored across the middle of the edge. Pull any solid color coins out and check the year. I find this to be the quickest way to get through a lot of coins in a short period of time. The coins are also arranged so that you can make it through a lot of coins in a short period of time. When you do find the coins that don’t have any copper across the edge, if they’re 1964 or older - you’ve got silver!

Pretty much any time you go out, you can’t help but pass by a coin sorting machine. There are a number of different companies that put them in grocery stores or malls but the key here is the “reject tray”. The machines are set to only accept certain weight coins for each diameter to ensure that the bags fill up with actual money. Most of those companies only accept regular non-silver US coins. This leaves the reject tray full of any variety of different coins.

Anytime I walk past one of these machines, I check for ignored rejected coins to see what might have been rejected. Most of the time, the lighter weight Canadian coins are in the tray but from time to time there will be a silver US coin or an interesting foreign coin. Never walk past one without a quick glance to find any discarded silver treasures.

Now that I’ve mentioned the two easiest ways to look for silver in your everyday life, I’ll mention the one that takes a bit more time. Unless you’re constantly looking through your change every time you make a cash purchase, you might miss unique coins that find their way into your pocket. My personal method is to separate by denomination in a different jar and then once or maybe twice per year go through and see what I can find.

The process of looking through coins is made a little easier when it’s already separated by denomination but it does take a bit more time than just looking at the edge of rolled coins. It can be time consuming but I do find one or two silver coins each time I go through the jars. The most common in my experience is dimes but quarters and 35% silver war nickels are among the finds each year. You can look at the blog article about silver content of different coins to find out what coins have silver in them.