Post Office Records

Submitted by HOST GFS Jill@aol.com

 

One rarely-considered source of ancestral records is the local post office. Depending upon the town, the postmaster, and how well records were kept in bygone years, there may be a wealth of information waiting for you beyond the service counter.

Last fall I was allowed to take home and pore through some of the archived material at my local post office. Even though I had no ancestors in this part of the country, I was interested in the possibility of helping out someone else who may have roots here. (Perhaps someone in NY, PA, or MI will do the same for folks like me someday!) My goal was to share my findings with other researchers via the Dallas County GenWeb project.

A historical display set up in the post office lobby last spring gave me the idea and I queried the postmaster. What all did they have in their archives and would he allow me to look through the materials and do some transcribing? He gave his consent and his business card, telling me to just give him a call ahead of time. Several months went by before I was able to find the time to pursue it further. The postmaster kindly took me back to his office and brought forth the old books with entries dating back to the late 1800s. I weeded out the newer materials so as not to infringe on any living person's privacy. (1930s to 1960s). Rather than sitting there with pencil and paper in hand, he told me to take them home and return them whenever I was finished, plus, he wanted to know when the information had been uploaded to the Internet. What an opportunity!

At http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/1926/cedar.html you can find the Cedar Hill, Texas Post Office archive transcriptions. I concentrated on turn-of-the century entries as these were more plentiful than other decades. Since returning the account and record books, I have done more local history research and found some corrections for the surnames listed. (Often they are hard to decipher and should be compared with other available records like the census.)

I would hope that other post offices in the country would be willing to allow interested individuals to borrow the books for transcribing purposes, or allow visitors to come in and carefully browse through them. Here you may find lists of previous postmasters, mail carriers, citizens who rented boxes, special deliveries, and the like. Almost all of our ancestors sent and received mail. Although there are certain restrictions pertaining to the tampering with the mail itself, I would hope that old postal records from a hundred or more years ago would be open to the public and become more accessible to family and local historians in the coming years.

Jill  

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