I found old share certificates. Are they worth anything?
The short answer
Possibly, and they are worth checking either way. A share certificate does not expire, and the holding it represents does not lapse because nobody looked at it for thirty years.
What matters is what happened to the company and to the register in the meantime. The company may have been renamed, merged into something else, or delisted. The shares may still sit on the register, or they may have been transferred to the government fund if dividends went unclaimed for long enough. All of those are recoverable — they just take different routes.
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