Eighteen-year-old Christian Hartch, of Greenwich, Ct., has been awarded the Professional Numismatists Guild (PNG) 2019 Young Numismatist (YN) Scholarship, which will pay his way to one of the six-day American Numismatic Association (ANA) Summer Seminar sessions this June.
Hartch began in numismatics at the age of five, when his father gave him a Whitman folder to begin collecting U.S. Lincoln cents. He worked at a local coin store while in high school for the past four years to learn more about the hobby, the marketplace and the business side of numismatics. His YouTube channel, Treasure Town, has more than 18,000 subscribers plus more than 1.5 million views on his coin collecting videos.
“I was super excited, super happy when I was told about winning the scholarship,” said Hartch, who has been accepted as a freshman at Princeton University this coming fall.
He plans to take a grading class at the ANA Summer Seminar this June before studying either economics or art and archaeology at Princeton.
His parents, Greg and Christa Hartch, are proud of their son’s accomplishments.
“We are so thankful that Christian will have the opportunity to attend the ANA conference in Colorado. Christian has worked hard to grow his coin YouTube channel, and we are thrilled that he is being recognized for his interest in numismatics,” said Greg.
Hartch said PNG member-dealer Christopher Moran, owner of The Happy Coin store in Cos Cob, Ct., “has been a big influence to me.”
At the age of 13, Hartch was the store’s first customer when it opened in early 2014, purchasing a U.S. 1864 two-cent piece for his collection. He began working at the store a year later in the summer before he entered high school.
“Working at the shop allows me to be immersed with rare coins, and across the board coins, currency, U.S. and world coins,” said Hartch. “I can see the numismatic world from both a collector’s perspective and the business side, and I’ve learned a lot about the market.”
The money to pay for the annual PNG YN Scholarship is administered from the PNG’s Gerald Bauman Memorial Fund. Bauman, who died in 2001, served for many years as a prominent coin dealer with Manfra, Tordella and Brookes in New York City.