Is This 1890's Cancel A New York Arrival Cancel?

Strictly speaking this is not a US cover, but I suspect the cancel may be and I hope that there is an expert here who can help me.

I have this example on a loose stamp, but am showing a complete cover taken from the book "CURACAO: An Identification Guide for Cancels" by Dick Phelps. My question concerns the barred circle 12. The stamp is from Venezuela, and the transit mark is Curacao (exact year uncertain) and the cover is to New York.




Does anybody know where this mark is from? When I asked Dick Phelps, he didn't know.

Jan

New York City did use that style of ellipse cancel with vertical bars in the 1880s and 1890s, but I couldn't tell you whether Venezuela or Curacao had one as well.


From Cole "Cancellations of the Banknote era 1870-1894"

Thank you for your reply.

I should have mentioned that Curacao never had such a cancel (even though I have seen a couple of stamps from Curacao with that cancel).

As I recently saw a postcard from Guatamala via New York to Europe with this cancel that shows no sign of having been near Venezuela, I doubt that they had this cancel either.

Jan

I spent a couple of hours at the Western Philatelic Library trying to research this postmark. I managed to find exactly one article about them (in the September 1953 issue of the American Philatelist).

The author calls them Incoming Foreign Mail Cancellations and says that they were used in New York. He observed 7 different hammers: The numbers 1 to 6 used in the period roughly 1870 to 1893 and the number 12 used roughly from 1893 to about 1914.

They appear to be quite scarce. The author once looked through an accumulation of 55000 stamps and found only 2 examples. Still, in over 40 years of looking, he managed to find about 200 examples representing over 30 different countries.

Unfortunately, he could not say what, if anything, the numbers represented, so I am still left with some unanswered questions.

Jan

Hi, I am curious if you have come up with more information about that postmark. I have some covers with it.