Cover Post Dates

I am getting intrigued by covers, particularly from the 1800's. I notice on older covers the postmark is often town, state, month and day but no year. Other than the stamp creation date, I assume there is no way to really know from the mark what year it is? (Assuming there is no inside material.) Was it common to not have the year in the postmark?

It depends on the country and the type of cancellation device used. The U.S. covers tend to be trickier and I've noticed most other countries will have a year. I haven't had any issues with any 19th century German area covers. I don't know why they didn't bother with a year on some cancellation devices within the U.S., but wt1 probably knows.

Well, for one thing, and this may or may not have anything to do with rationale for not including the year on cancels, but when people wrote letters to each other, they included the full date at the top fo the letter.

Of course these days, thanks to current and past postal historians, we can now nail down date by cancellation device used, rate paid, date range of stamp use and perhaps other factors I am not thinking of right now.

sometimes you can get an idea of year by the wartermark of the paper (cover), mostly seen in stationary.