This site is designed to provide an example of the various district name overprint used during the period of classic stamps, from 1856 to 1883. In fact, there was even an occasional rare usage of district name overprints applied to the medallion issue, some of those will be illustrated. Some of the classic overprints are very rare so it may not be possible to exhibit every one, but the webmaster promises to attempt to eventually locate every one so that (someday) a complete reference may be available herein.

This reference may be used to help qualify stamps that you have acquired or wish to acquire. On classic Mexican stamps, determining that the district name overprint is genuine is half the battle in determining the authenticy. Many forgeries exist of classic Mexican stamps, but the forgers were seldom successful completely matching the district name overprints of the various districts. Many of the fakes are good, but there is always some small anomaly that leads the student to determine that it is not genuine. It may be the length of the entire overprint, or the distance between a few key letters, or the height of the overprint or just the shapes of the letters.

If you are trying to qualify an overprint and it is greatly different from those exhibited in this web, then the overprint is no good or the webmaster has not been able to locate an overprint like the one you have. The latter case would only be ture for those very rare overprints like BARCA (eagle period), or ROSALES (eagle period), or some other such rare district name.