Best Process For Identifying Stamps

My first post here so nice to meet everyone. I started a very small stamp collection when I was a kid and haven't touched them since. Fast forward 25 years and I have gotten the itch to resume my hobby. I have piles of stamps, both USA and foreign and am looking to better identify what I have and put some order to the madness. I'm mainly interested in USA for now. Does anyone have recommendations on how to look at a stamp and know where or how to begin identifying what it is? Do I search some database for the president or image on the stamp to identify a Scott number? At the moment all I have is a Mystic Stamps catalog to go by and no Scott catalog. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

Welcome.
You might want to take a look at the Stamp Smarter website; it has many tools and references to help you ID stamps.
http://www.stampsmarter.com/1847usa/1847Home.html
Don

Hello lokus -

I'm Jessica from Mystic Stamp. I read your message and wanted to mention we recently improved the search function on our website. If you go to MysticStamp.com take a look in the upper right corner for the search box. Enter a keyword or two there and perhaps that could help you identify some of your stamps.

Congrats on rediscovering your hobby!

Jessica

Hi Jessica,
If Mystic would like to support the community while promoting their website there are a number of inexpensive ways to do so including banner ads, sponsoring a forum category, or even simply donating a few dollars.
Don

If you don't have one, get a perforation gauge. They're cheap. And use it. When you think you have identified a stamp, make sure it has the correct perforations. I didn't, and made an ass of myself, trying to sell some rather expensive stamps on ebay, when the stamps were a much cheaper version, identical in appearance but with different perforations.

And I think someday soon you will want a Scott Specialized. Buy one a few years old. Much cheaper.

Don

Thanks for all the recommendations. I'll give both those options a shot. I actually do have a perforation gauge but need to figure out how to use it. One of my old neighbors was a stamp collector and gave me the gauge as well as a binder with commemorative pages to place stamps in and pages for all the other stamps. It was very nice of him. He remembered that I mentioned that I used to collect as a kid as before he sold his collection due to downsizing he gave me a bunch of stamps and supplies.

One other way to identify a stamp that I used as last resort is scan or take a picture of that stamp and perform an image search (but leave no space outside of the stamp). Works very well but usually for mint stamps or light cancelled stamps. Most of the time you'll be directed towards auctions of that stamp and you'll find its SC #. However, for European stamps, more often you'll find referred Michel (MI) # (this a German Catalogue).
However, having a catalogue like Scott would definitely help. If you don't want to buy the whole Volume 1, there is a vendor on ebay who sells cuts from Scott catalogue for each country so you can buy only US.
Good Luck!