The way packages are transported here in Germany and the way they are delivered makes me believe that each one of them contains a child. The most recent one took four weeks to travel a distance of roughly 100 miles.

There are a few that are manhandled and a few that get lost, but it only proves that there are caring hearts out there who try to protect children from being physically abused.

The German postal system is then the best one on the planet.

Bar none.

The US Postal system is, in the main, pretty good. Mostly. But once in a while things still manage to get caught up in mail limbo.

It wasn’t all that long ago that something was sent to me from Canada. It didn’t arrive and didn’t arrive. When it finally did, the postmarks on it said that it had spent weeks floating around the south before it finally made its way back north to me. It was rather bizarre, almost as if the post offices couldn’t decide what to do with it and just kept shuffling it along to the next town. Some kind soul finally took the address seriously and sent it north again.

But I still wonder how people used to send children by mail. And what ‘separate incidents’ spurred the postal service to institute a regulation forbidding it.

I’m going to post the fact on one of the forums I frequent, a forum with sometimes the oddest collection of experts on obscure topics, to see if anyone has a lead. My interest has been perked up.

Everyone’s given up. The closest we got to an answer was that a stamp collector vaguely remembered having read about an incident as implied by your original snippet of information: “Linn’s Stamp News reprinted an article from way back when about someone actually doing this.”

The thread then rapidly disintegrated and sprouted various more modern ways of getting children to the intended destination by zipping and sending them via eMail or by bit-torrenting them.

Forums are a wonderful thing.

LOL! I think zipping and emailing them would be less messy than bit-torrenting them. 

I belonged to a similar kind of forum so I understand exactly how conversations morph into the most entertaining and unrelated tangents. Thanks for trying, though.

You know, I’ll bet if I write to the Postal Museum with an inquiry, they’ll provide an answer. I think I will ‘cause this little historical factoid just won’t let me go. I’ve gotta know.

That would be great.
I’m really interested (being a closet stamp collector ... at times).