Album shows work of 19th century postal ‘detectives’
This month’s object of the month at the National Postal Museum is an album of dead letters that were brought back to life by the Post Office’s Dead Letter Office in the late 1800’s. The folks who worked at the Dead Letter Office obviously took pride in their work- according to the article at the museum’s web site:
When clerks cracked a particularly challenging mail mystery, they forwarded the mail along with a letter requesting that the envelope be returned for the Dead Letter Office’s collection. With the envelope pasted into the album, the correctly decoded address was written on the reverse page, like the answers to a trivia game.
There’s also a link to an earlier article on the Dead Letter Office that shows just how meticulous these ‘detectives’ were:
Although guesswork certainly came in handy, there was no substitute for experience, and Patti Lyle Collins had plenty of that. For example, she knew the names of almost every major corporation in the United States, plus most colleges, government agencies and private institutions. She also knew much of what there was to know about many American cities. Because of her ability, when a letter crossed her desk addressed to “Giuvani Cirelili, Presidente Sterite, Catimoa,” she knew exactly where to send it. Although there was no post office in the country named “Catimoa,” there apparently was only one city at that time with a “President Street,”—Baltimore, Maryland. Within a matter of days, this letter reached the person for whom it was intended. She was a skilled decipherer who could quickly translate by sound such destinations as “Reikzhieer, Stiejt Kanedeka” (Roxbury, State of Connecticut) or “Tossy Tanner, Tx.” (Corsicana, Texas) or “Cikepu Kornsors, Levynworth Co. (Kickapoo City, Leavenworth County, Kansas).
