Anyone Doing The Same?

Briefzentrums ...thanks Don, that's another idea, almost like a modern form of the numeral postmarks. I need to look into that as well

I think Switzerland has something similar

AAAAHHHH...Austria (the empire, that is)!
It's a wonderful source of forerunners for me. Probably got more of them than for present-day Austria itself. The Scott catalog lists a bunch of them separately as "Austria-Hungary", so that's a separate group of forerunners for me, too.
The whole field of forerunners can be quite complicated (especially for the Ukraine) and that's what makes my collection even more joyful for me.

Blaamand:

I believe most of the European countries have similar postal distribution centers, but haven't looked into any others. A list of Germany's centers with the center numbers and corresponding cities is in the link below. Includes a useful map as well.

Don

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief...utsche_Post)

I don't do Briefzentrums, but I do see many, many of them in my searches. If you want to send me a list of those you need, I'd be willing to keep an eye out for them for you.

I consider the hunt for Forerunners the most exciting aspects of collecting postmarks. Haven't found many from Ukraine yet, but I sure am looking

Yes Don - and I would add 'unfortunately'
With the result that modern stamps have less and less 'proper CDS' postmarks, meaning handstriked and with placename.

Yepp, the Austrian Empire is an eldorado for lunatics like us !

FYI, if it helps: Russia, USSR, Austria, Hungary, Austria-Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Western Ukraine, Carpatho-Ukraine (if one can ever find one of these). I wonder if the World War 2 issues by Slovakia had any (annexed from Carpatho-Ukraine), but I haven't attempted to research that yet.

Yepp, isn't it fascinating how the borders have shifted throughout history, and how nations have emerged, vanished and re-emerged... forerunners can plot the timeline for those changes pretty well. Just another good reason to collect them

Today was a very fine day ; Me and my brother were trading postmarks from Austria (In such a trade we totally ignore what stamp the postmark is on, we are solely trading different readable postmarks 1:1 ) He had far more postmarks than me, so I gained about 20 new place-names from Austria. Maybe more satisfying than trading different stamps.

EdziuMM! There are more crazy people out here. I have recently started collecting cancellations, and have now just completed the Austrian stamps included forerunners from that empire. Some examples from L&V and the Chech Republic attached. Loving it!

How do you get the white characters on a black background? Do you reverse print on a printer?

Hello, Interesting topic. I have long been a believer in collecting stamps with the cancel appropriate for the period in which the stamp was issued. Hope this is in the context of the thread.

So often these days (and perhaps not surprising really) we see old stamps used to make up postal value. More value in using mint stamps on mail but I try to only keep for my collection stamps with clear cancels of the year or close to the year the stamp was issued.

Two simple examples shown for interest.
SG 1808, (the aviator) issued 1994 and SG 1639,(the swan) issued 1993, with a 2001 cancel.

Enjoy your philately Michael

Angore: The white characters on a black background is easy to fix in e.g XL.
My brother has created a fantastic XL-sheet where we actually make a list of all towns/postmarks we can find for a specific country. By this xl-sheet we can easily search for postmarks if any characters are missing/unclear. Next we register the postmarks in the same list, and by that we can have the xl-sheet to present a alfabetic register of all the postmarks we actually have. Finally, and probably the best part, is that we easily can get the XL-sheet to present the postmarks we have not yet made any "tag" for on a seperate sheet. Then we quite simple do a print out of this sheet and use a paper knife to cut (along some tiny lines)the tags of the sheet.

All in all this is a very easy way of having a searchable database for postmarks, a register of the postmarks collected pluss a tool to make the tags all in the same XL-sheet.

As I said my brother "has the copyright" of the system, but I will assume he would more than love to share this sheet to all brothers around the world that would be interrested.

Barbu: Go, man, go! You're off to a great start & your album pages are terrific.