Sell inherited jewellery by post, in your own time

The single most common thing people say when they message us about an inherited box is that they feel they ought to keep it, and they do not know why. That is a normal thing to feel and it is worth saying plainly: you can keep whatever you want to keep. Sentiment is not something we are going to argue you out of, and nobody here benefits from you regretting a decision.

What we can do is tell you what each item actually is, so the decision is made with information rather than guesswork. It is common for a box to contain three or four pieces worth genuinely keeping, a handful of items that are gold-plated or costume and worth nothing as metal, and a heavy chain nobody had noticed that carries most of the value in the whole box. Until it is weighed and tested, none of that is visible.

If you send a parcel and then decide you want a particular piece back, say so before you accept the offer and we will take it out and return it. That happens regularly and it is not a problem.

Older British jewellery has some habits worth knowing about. A great deal of mid-century UK jewellery is 9ct, which is 375 parts per thousand fine gold and therefore 37.5% gold by weight. That sounds low and disappoints people, but weight does at least as much work as purity: a heavy 9ct curb chain routinely outvalues a small 18ct ring by a wide margin.

Wedding bands from before the 1970s are often 22ct, which is unusually high for British jewellery and worth having identified properly. Victorian and Edwardian pieces may be 15ct or 12ct, standards abolished in 1932, which means they will carry a hallmark most modern high-street counters cannot read at a glance. Rolled gold and gold-filled items were extremely common in the same era and are worth nothing as scrap, which is a disappointment better delivered before you post than after.

Silver is where inherited parcels are most often underestimated. A canteen of sterling cutlery, a tea set or a set of napkin rings can add up to a serious weight of 925 silver, and those are exactly the items that sit in a loft for a decade because nobody thinks of them as jewellery.

If you are an executor rather than a beneficiary, the paperwork matters as much as the figure. Every offer we make is itemised: each piece appears on its own line with its weight, its assayed purity and the per-gram rate applied, and the total is shown separately. That document is usable as a supporting valuation for estate administration whether or not you go on to sell.

Where an estate is being divided between several people, it is usually easier to get the itemised offer first and circulate it, so everyone is looking at the same numbers before anyone decides anything. There is no time limit on that from our side. Our probate and inheritance page covers the executor-specific detail, and the executor's guide goes further into the process.

We ask every seller for a photograph of UK photo identification on every transaction, whatever the value. There is no threshold and no exception. For inherited items we also ask you to confirm you have the right to sell them, which for most people is a single sentence and nothing more.

This is deliberate. A buyer who does not ask where inherited jewellery came from is a buyer who is equally relaxed about jewellery that was not inherited, and that is not a business you want your grandmother's rings passing through.