Utility For Looking Up Post Offices

I've been using Jim Forte's post office lookup website when I want to try to identify a partial cancellation, but I was frustrated that I could not narrow it down by date.

I created a new utility for this and put it online in case it might be useful for others. I used Richard W. Helbock's United States Post Offices for the post office data.

It is hosted with PlateAI, but if it is useful, I would donate it to Stamp Smarter.

It does a bit more sophisticated pattern matching, allows restricting by dates and has a street view for post offices (including locations of DPOs).

Let me know what you think - and if anyone has a digital listing of R.R. cancellations (even scans of Remele or Towle), I could extend this to R.R. cancellations. (not sure about copyright implications).. . same for inland waterways or other markings.

https://plateai.stampplating.com/postoffices/

Not sure what you are trying to fix. Once the post office or post offices are named (including state/territory) he lists the dates of operation for each name combination.

Now if you wanted to know that Station D in San Francisco was closed for a few weeks around January 1, 1913 as the office's location was being moved, that detail must be found elsewhere.

If I'm looking for a post office that existed in 1855, I don't want to sort through post offices that were not open then. With partial names in a CDS, narrowing down by year helps a lot. Also, if the postmark is something like "AARONS RUN," I want "Aaron's Run" to be exposed. I also want to be able to do more sophisticated searches - mainly with single-character wild cards, but it might also be helpful to make guesses on characters (Could be a "C" or a "G", for example).

Have fun. The early post office may be tougher to find but the USPOD Postal Guide, generally issued once per year list the vast majority of post office open that year.