Vintage Return To Sender Cover

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this or not. My stepmother gave me a box of papers she inherited when a lady she took care of passed. The lady and her mother never threw anything away.

I wanted to share this vintage return to sender post mark on an envelope I found. I am not concerned about value, as I figure it is either worth nothing or a couple of dollars at most.

Do they even use a Return to Sender post mark anymore?

I don't think "Return to Sender" rubber stamps are used much anymore, as they have given way to imprinted labels, such as this one I just received last week from a Christmas card that was sent to an old address:



For whatever it's worth, it may be interseting to note that your cover does have what I would consider a late use of a duplex cancel, though. By 1961 most of those duplex cancellation devices had been replaced by more updated ones.

Thanks for the info. Stewartsville is a smaller town possibly the Post Office was slow to update?

The envelope was open so I took a peek at the contents, the woman's mother wrote to the company saying she had found a spool with a message saying "this spool is valuable" write to us. I'm guessing it was a promotion/giveaway around that time.

-MV

Just as an update to my 01/18/2015 post, on 01/29/2015, I received a "return to sender" of another Christmas Card I sent with the caption "UTF" (Unable to Forward).

What I found interesting is that in addition to the USPS yellow label, someone actually used an old rubber stamp with the "Return to Sender" caption. I haven't seen that stamp used in a long time, but apparently the USPS still uses it occasionally even with 2015 automation:

Left & right hands on the same cover sent in mid-2002!

As a trivia tangent, I had a chance to examine several thousand returned covers from c2000 and found left hands were less than 5% of the total. Looking at returned covers from 100-140 years ago there was a much higher proportion of left hands.

Certainly the increase in automation and the decline in first class mail result in fewer pointing hand covers being produced these days.