US #1 And #2 On Covers - Expertize

One or two auction sale appearances for an item is not a provenance, whether they are name sales or not. A quick look notes a Siegel sale from the 1980s; where was this cover before then? Otherwise, we see auctions in the 2000s, hardly proof of an unbroken chain of custody to indicate a genuine cover of the 1847 issue. I see only one price reported for any of the three covers above. Even that does not mean it actually sold. With a name sale, the items included are not necessarily that of the collector in question unless specified. The cover to JJ Stuart is from a known correspondence but we've seen covers faked using the lesser covers from other accumulations. That said, I'm confident the 10c cover here is genuine, for whatever that is worth.

The Shroud of Turin has a provenance that goes back to the 1300s. It was and is by itself insufficient proof of genuineness. Faith might tell you one thing, but a report from the 1300s calling it a forgery and radiocarbon dating say it is a fake.

I've decided to take the 5 cent Bridgeport and the 10 cent covers to the APS show for PF to examine. Not going to bother with the other 5 cent for now. I trust that the certificates I get back are a little more precise than the one for the item below from my collection.

1829 - clearly an Earliest Known Use!
Don

Great when certs are pictured. Topic subscribed. Waiting for the showing of the certs.

I gave the two covers in question, along with about 15 other stamps including the 404 cited in one of my other threads, to Larry Lyons at the PF booth today. Will be interesting to see how they all come back.

I had heard of the New Haven Yale bulldog cancel, but never actually seen an example before. Thanks! It's a neat cover.

Being on the USPCS list or having been auctioned by a well known auction company or having come from a collection of a well known collector is not a certification. I see some things that give me some pause but that is just my eye and I am not the level of expert that person who would do the certification for either the APS or the PF would be. If you want to be sure that all three of these are "right" and if you want to sell them in the future as being certain as to what they seem to be then you will need to have them certified by either the APS or the PF and if they come back as genuine in all respects then keep those certificates with the covers when you go to sell them. You will get better prices for them with such certificates.

Following up on this thread as promised - below are the PF certs for the #1 and #2 on cover that I said I would submit for expertization. No matter what I do to the first image, it keeps turning sidways.

Thank you ever so much for showing the certs. A great day in my life. Very nicely done.

redwoodrandy - thank you much for the kind comments and for flipping the image so that others can read it more easily.

I know that a great many covers from this era and up through decades later rarely have a date in their cancellations and the only way to know for sure when such covers were sent depends on the original enclosure being present or the recipient docketing - normally by handwriting - when it was received. But not knowing the date is frustrating to me. Sometimes one can use the post mark useage to bracket some years, but even that is still tantalizingly unfulfilling for me. Maybe I'm just too picky.

Oracle of Delphi, many, many thanks for the followup.