BDR Database Search

Search the BDR database using one or more of the choices below. Enter the initials on the cancel, or an acronym representing the cancel in the first box. If you have fragmentary information from the cancel, use any combination of the other choices. Wild cards can be used in any but the first choice.

Initials Fragment:

Name Fragment:

City Fragment:

State Fragment (in caps, 2 letters maximum):

Business/Product Fragment:

Cancel Fragment (BDR Format):

Wild cards: use _ for a single missing character; use % for multiple missing characters

Example Search

The stamp at the right has an interesting cancel that is poorly legible. However, with the BDR search options it is easy to find it in the tables, and it turned out to be a cancel which had not previously been seen on the RB20. There are many ways this search can be done. What is legible is an faint H near the left edge, a &Co, some kind of fancy border, and a Mo center bottom. Approach #1: This information should be contained in the cancel description. So we could search for just the letters we can see along with wildcards for suspected missing characters. Using the wildcard % we can search with H%&Co. to look for the cancel. The search results contain 8 pages of results, and a matching cancel HNL&Co appears in these results. Approach #2: Add MO to the search window for the state of Missouri since Mo. looks like it follows an illegible city name. This narrows the results to a single page containing HNL&Co. Approach #3: Try searching for fancy cancels in Missouri. According to our cancel shorthand, the cancel should contain fcy for fancy. Search with MO in the state search window and fcy in the cancel search window and the search results show just three fancy cancels, one of them being the HNL&Co cancel. This demonstrates both the flexibility of the searching and the ability to narrow the search results.

Cancel Matching the Search Results

The BDR database includes this image in the above search results with the different example strategies. The cancel on this RB20 was identified in this way, and is now included in the search results which show this cancel being known on RB20, RB21, and the RB22.