Expert: Steven Taylor - 6/6/2010

Question
Just came across my Grandfathers 4 shares issued by Consolidated Mining Syndicate, Toronto 2nd Jan 1929. I know it has no value, but what happened to this company.

Jeff

Answer
Jeff, I have no information on these shares. Anytime you see the term "syndicate" from that era, it denotes a special kind of company. With a few exceptions, they were not publicly traded companies. Instead, they were more akin to what we would call limited partnerships today. They were sold to a smaller group of people, mostly through word of mouth or similar technique. 4 shares may not sound like a lot, but many syndicates limited themselves to a small number of shares, so 4 shares was possibly a fairly significant percentage of the overall syndicate.

Most of these syndicates were formed to explore for minerals in a specific area or even a specific property. They were extremely speculative, and most eventually failed, as they tended to terminate when the original seed money ran out. If they did not find any minerals worth mining (or exploring further), they usually just closed up shop and that was that.

Because the small number of members and lack of publicly traded status, these old syndicates are almost impossible to track. You can try the Province of Ontario and see if they have any information, but a lot of these investments were sold without proper registration. In the age before stronger securities laws requiring registration of investments, the Province may not have known it even existed. Without any other supporting documentation, that is probably your best approach.