New member intro, and a request for advice

[Frankbrent]

Greetings all,

Thought this might be the best place to solicit some expert opinions.

I'm (obviously) a noob here, but not to message boards in general, so I know that places like this are the best sources of info and (mostly) friendly advice. so here goes:

Outside of my early teens, I'm not a collector. However, my wife's late cousin most certainly was. When he passed away unexpectedly three years ago, among the possessions he left to my wife and I was an extensive baseball card collection. Based on recent perusal of some dealer sites (mostly Dean's), I'm aware of the potential value of this collection, and would be interested in selling it.

I've emailed someone at Dean's, who suggested I send them part of the collection for evaluation (none of the cards have been professionally graded). I'm hesitant to do so, for obvious reasons. I'd prefer to sell the entire collection at once, as opposed to piecemeal, even though I could probably get more for some of the more valuable individual cards. Unfortunately I don't have the time or resources to dedicate to such a project. Also, a portion of the collection was damaged when the climate controlled mini warehouse we were storing them in flooded (I dried the individual cards out, but they warped, and in the process I had to take them out of their meticulously organized folders - yeah, I'm still sick about all that )

Any way, tl;dr version - I'm looking to sell a large and very valuable vintage collection, and am asking y'all for help - any suggestions/recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!!