Daily AncestorLetter carrier
A letter carrier was a post office employee who delivered mail to homes and businesses and collected it from mailboxes, today usually called a mail carrier.
Letter carrier is the American English name for a mailman or postman, and it survives in the name of the union of city carriers. The work was delivering letters and parcels on a set route and picking up mail from public boxes.
Women carried mail in a few places in the 1880s, but the first women city carriers were appointed during World War I, so before then a letter carrier in a census is almost always a man.
As seen in a recordOccupation and industry columns of the 1910 to 1940 census
Wm. J. Rourke, 41, Letter carrier, U.S. Post Office
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Daily Ancestor. "Letter carrier." Dictionary of Old Record Words. https://dailyancestor.com/dictionary/occupations/letter-carrier. Last checked 2026-10-10.