Books, websites, & advice for Jean Patricia
Your best stock strategy may be to just stand there-- do nothing. If your father built up those positions over years of buy & hold, then I doubt you're going to do any harm in the next 12 months. Leave the stuff in the brokerage, don't trade, file the paperwork when it arrives, cash any checks you get into a money market, and let 'em ride.
Meet with the advisor if you must, but keep your hand on your wallet. You don't have to pay for education (school) any more than you have to pay for financial advice. First, I'd start with the classic Bernstein "Four Pillars of Investing" from the library. Learn the vocabulary on diversification and low-expense investing. You can also read his articles at efficientfrontier.com and look for subjects that catch your interest.
An older buy & hold stock classic is "Eight Steps to Seven Figures" by Charles B. Carson. It was written in the charming bull-market innocence of the late '90s but it may match your father's philosophy. It's one of the few books that advocates holding stocks and that has also stood the test of buy & hold. Another columnist you may want to read (who's profiled in the Eight Figures book) is Humberto Cruz. You can read his articles in the Florida Sun-Sentinel at
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/business/columnists/sfla-business-cruz.columnist .
Other stock-trading (and stock-holding) websites include the Motley Fool and Investopedia.com. Both will educate you on the basics of buying stocks and give you ideas on when (if) to sell.
I'd stay away from Bill O'Neill, Investor's Business Daily, Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. They're active traders and you don't need to join their club unless this stuff absolutely fascinates you.
Finally, here's Paul Farrell's column on two questions to ask your "financial planner". http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/print_story.asp?print=1&guid={736E8CB3-BFD2-4889-8F9E-A81F9966192F}&siteid=mktw It's a pass-fail quiz-- (1) What investments does the broker hold? You don't want to know amounts, you just want to know which funds & stocks in what percentages. Ducking this question indicates hypocritical advice or someone getting paid from commissions. (2) Can you recommend some equivalent no-load funds, especially low-cost index funds from Vanguard? Again if they can't come up with a recommendation, you can do better anywhere else.
Bottom line, first you'll want to know how much it originally cost to buy those stocks, how much they split, and how much (if any) was reinvested (dividends). That'll establish your cost basis for taxes, and this may be the one area where you want the help of a tax accountant who's skilled at tracking through this jungle.
Next you'll want to figure out what to sell first-- if anything. I'd sell only when you need the cash or if you decide that you're too concentrated in one area. (There are a number of tools to help with this analysis, including Quicken and Morningstar's websites.) If you don't need the money and you're not overconcentrated in one area, then don't worry about it.
If you're having trouble sleeping at night for fear of the market crashing and wiping you out (probably unlikely at your low cost basis), then your brokerage could help you set what are called "trailing sell stops" at a price of 10-15% below each stock's current price. Only do this if a market correction makes you feel nauseous. If you don't care then it's not worth doing it. But if you were worried about a correction and it happened, a price drop of that amount would trigger the sale of that stock. You could then keep the cash and reinvest it in a bond or stock mutual fund at Vanguard.
Your only costs are hours of reading and plowing through websites, plus a few hundred bucks to a tax accountant if your records aren't already organized.
There's also plenty of free advice here (worth what you pay for it!) that can help you with your analysis. If you want to list the stock portfolio here, it'd be best to do so with the comany's name, its stock ticker, and its percentage of the total (don't do it in dollar terms). You'll get plenty of opinions on your status & options!