Willis Craft: Postmaster

     Ancestry.com has a relatively new database, "Appointments of U. S. Postmasters, 1832-1971."  I came across it as a hint for another relative, and then started searching for other relatives. I already had a newspaper clipping that said that my 4x Great Grandfather, Willis Craft, had been postmaster. I wanted to see if the information was backed up in this database.

    The newspaper clipping above is dated 1851, but the only result I could find in the Postmasters database showed that Willis became Postmaster of Craftsville in 1858 (after leaving his position as State House Representative).  His predecessor, Kelly Sullivan took over in 1854.  Perhaps Willis had been postmaster before that?

     Unfortunately, I had trouble searching the database. When I searched for results in Elbert County, Georgia, I came up with "no matches."  That's strange, since the above listing is for Craftsville, Elbert, Georgia.  And other search by location turned up results, such as Lincoln County, Georgia. There seems to be a problem with Elbert County - and probably other random locations as well.

     I ended up browsing pages to find the previous years for Elbert County, and did eventually find what I was looking for. Willis Craft first became Postmaster in February of 1851, as indicated by the newspaper article.

     This entry had been mis-transcribed, which is why I couldn't find it by a name search. I should have been able to find it by location though. For a database that was created based on location, it's a pretty big deal that the location search doesn't work properly.