The Study of Postal History is Vast

With the impending doom of our US Post Offices closing and our entire U.S mail system as a whole.  I believe postal history and stamp collecting will increase in importance and value to the historic thread in our lives.  As a child, I was given stamps from grandmother, Edith Faulstich, which I have hung onto all these years. And, I would like to know more about any of the following early 1900 stamps and or covers. If you know anything about any of them, please let me know. It would make my grandmother proud that I still have them.

Postal history is the study of postal systems and how they operate and, or, the collecting of covers and associated material illustrating historical episodes of postal systems. The term is attributed to Robson Lowe, a professional philatelist, stamp dealer and stamp auctioneer, who made the first organised study of the subject in the 1930s and described philatelists as “students of science”, but postal historians as “students of humanity”.

Postal history has become a philatelic collecting speciality in its own right. While philately is concerned with the study of the stamps per se, postal history can include the study of postal rates, postal policy, postal administration, political effects on postal systems, postal surveillance and the consequences of politics, business, and culture on postal systems; basically anything to do with the function of the collection, transportation and delivery of mail. Areas of special interest include disrupted or transitional periods, such as wars which Edith Faulstich wrote about and our military occupation in Siberia, and her saga of the mail to and from remote areas during WWI.

In studying or collecting any postal history subject some overlap is inevitable because it is impossible to separate the different areas that affect the mail from one another. Regional studies like countries of origin, native districts, cities, towns or villages, places associated with family roots, or workplaces, can comprise geographical based postal history studies. In the past collectors usually based their studies on “mail from” but “mail to” and “mail through” a place expand the postal service story because outgoing mail mainly shows marking associated with the areas of study while incoming mail tells a much broader story and are now more likely to be included. Transportation based studies can include,Aerophilately, Balloon mail, Maritime mail, Rocket mail, while subject based studies can include Express mail,Marcophily, Military mail, Postal censorship, Pre-adhesive mail and Registered mail (Source: Wikipedia)

Thanks for reading my post and I hope you will read more about my grandmother, Edith Faulstich. If you have any information to share I would love to hear from you.  Here are some other resources directly below as well.

• Fundamentals of Philately. American Philatelic Society. 1990 revised ed., ISBN 0-9335-8013-4. Hornung, Otto (1970)
• The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Stamp Collecting. Hamlyn. ISBN 0-600-01797-4
• World History Stamp Atlas. pub: Black Cat. 1991 reprint. ISBN 0-7481-0309-0