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Collecting Confederate Postal History can be risky. There are all sorts of pitfalls waiting to trap the collector.

The purpose of this exhibit is to illustrate for educational purposes only a few of the more common ways fakers have tried to forge and phony Confederate material.

In this exhibit you will see covers with added stamps, covers with substituted stamps, covers with phony postmarks, and a cover that is an out-and-out forgery. For comparison are also shown an example each of a cover with a repaired stamp as well as a restored cover. All of the covers here displayed were obtained either from private collections, large auction lots, or as individual items from various dealers. Most were at one time or another thought to be completely genuine by the owner. Only two of the covers shown were specially prepared for demonstration in this exhibit.

To the viewers of this exhibit -- I hope that you enjoy my educational display and that you will find some useful information to help you detect the numerous fakes that are just waiting to trap the postal history collector.

To view the exhibit, you can either cycle through the 34 pages in order by hitting the "Next Page" button at the bottom of each page eventually returning to this page. Or you can pick and choose which page to visit by using the exhibit Table of Contents below.

-- Begin the Cycle with Page 1 --

Table of Contents

• Page 1 -- Forgery
• Page 2 -- Added Stamps
• Page 3 -- Added Stamp
• Page 4 -- Substituted Stamp
• Page 5 -- Substituted Stamp
• Page 6 -- Phony Postmark
• Page 7 -- Fabricated Postmark
• Page 8 -- Fox Fake
• Page 9 -- Added Stamp and Fake Postmark
• Page 10 -- Cover Conversion
• Page 11 -- Contrived Covers
• Page 12 -- Contrived Covers
• Page 13 -- Repaired Stamp
• Page 14 -- Restored Cover
• Page 15 -- Genuine or Fake?
• Page 16 -- Added Stamp and Phony Postmark
• Page 17 -- Added Stamp
• Page 18 -- Added Stamps
• Page 19 -- Fake Perfs
• Page 20 -- Genuine vs Fake
• Page 21 -- Fake Frame-Line Stamp on Cover
• Page 22 -- Fake Through-the-Lines Cover
• Page 23 -- Counterfeit Brownsville, Tex Cover
• Page 24 -- Fake Wallpaper Cover
• Page 25 -- Fake 10c Blue Type I Perforated Cover
• Page 26 -- Stamp Photocopy on Cover
• Page 27 -- Fake 20c Green Bisect on Cover
• Page 28 -- Fake Richmond, Va Postmark
• Page 29 -- Springfield Facsimiles on Cover
• Page 30 -- Fake "C.S.A." Overprint
• Page 31 -- Fake Wetumpka, Ala Postmark
• Page 32 -- Fake Old Capitol Prison POW Cover
• Page 33 -- Postmark Incompatible with CSA Usage
• Page 34 -- Bogus Ship Island, Miss Military Prison Handstamp

19 OCT 1999 -- An interesting dilemma concerning a cover that was the subject of a 1992 Confederate Philatelist article has recently surfaced. Is the Clarks Mills NC Grid Cover a Fake or a Genuine Cover -- or is it possible to tell? Read about it here.

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