Hello and welcome.

I’m Martyn Downer, founder of My Family Silver.

Thanks for stopping by.

I know how difficult it is to match a piece of silver engraved with a family crest to the right people. I’m regularly told that a big motivation for buying silver engraved with their crest is for posterity and sentimentality. As some 40,000 surnames have a crest attached to them, that’s a lot of people to attach crested silver to!

We also believe the internet is crying out for a single, trusted site for the promotion of antique and modern silver by reputable dealers from around the world (think of it as an alternative to abebooks.com or Amazon for books). After all, like a book, a piece of silver is made of a standard material guaranteed by hallmark The hallmark is a signifier of it’s quality and that you are investing in the real thing. However, Silver is in fact so much more than that! Centuries of history, hundreds of makers and thousands of stories: Sharing these stories with you, our readers, that is the aim of myfamilysilver. What’s more, a lot of silver has a unique, hitherto hidden, value which only the internet can unlock. Join us in our blogging journey.

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Stay with us as there’s a whole host of exciting features coming to myfamilysilver which will be revealed first to you, our readers, on this very blog before launch of the site in June 2009. Let’s not forget that this is also a place for dealers and collectors (like you?) to share ideas and to talk about the fascinating world of silver.A few things that I’d like to talk about for example are fairs and auctions; new discoveries and old friends.