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).