JOURNAL OF ALBERTA POSTAL HISTORY Issue #11 Edited by Dale Speirs, Box 6830, Calgary, Alberta T2P 2E7, or
[email protected] Published November 2016 CHECKLIST OF ALBERTA POSTAL HISTORIES compiled by Dale Speirs When I first began considering writing the postal history of Alberta, I did a literature search and found next to nothing. Much of what passes for postal history for any area is not. The following are not genuine postal history: 1) Checklists of postmarks. I collect postmarks myself but by themselves they are artifacts, not the actual history of a post office. 2) “Here is a cover” stories. Interesting, but only vignettes. 3) Social histories of towns illustrated by some covers or stamps. This is the most common type of pseudo-postal history. Long detailed accounts of a settlement but only a paragraph or two about the post office or the people who ran them. I recently ran into a problem with writing Alberta postal history, that of duplication by others. The May 2016 forest fire which caused the evacuation of Fort McMurray in the Athabasca Tar Sands prompted me to spend several weeks writing a postal history of the area. You can imagine my dismay when I opened the Sep/Oct 2016 issue of CANADIAN PHILATELIST and discovered that David Piercey had beaten me into print on the subject. A fine article, and I hold no grudge. It’s just one of those things. As a result, this issue of JAPH has a checklist of postal history articles of Alberta already published, the genuine kind, not here-is-a-cover stories, to help others avoid duplication.