Customer Records

Customer Records

Customer Sales, Subscription, Delivery, and Short-term Contract records

I recently had an opportunity to review some records from a very unusual source:  customer records from a fuel oil delivery salesmen from the early post-World War II years.  This is a category of record types that I have seldom encountered, let alone used, and it may seem that such things would be entirely useless when studying old buildings.  Let me explain why such records might sometimes have value.

Customer records will often be organized in either of two ways:  by customer name, or by delivery address.  Either form of organization has its advantages.  When studying buildings that were tenanted, for example, land title records may not provide what is needed.  If census and city directory records do not provide the identities of tenants (either because their occupancy falls between census intervals or because directories did not include an entry for the person(s) in question), it can be hard to discover who lived in a particular location, or where a specific person or family lived.  Telephone directories may not be available for the years in question, or specific persons may not have had a phone.  Customer records can be helpful whether the product, service, or commodity in question was mailed or delivered directly.


Examples of types of Customer records


If tenants can be identified, and if they are still living and their whereabouts can be traced, then there may be long-shot possibilities that photographs or other records of buildings may be discovered from a date prior to the making of post-war changes, remodelings, or demolitions.

In this case, these were records produced by salesmen for Esso (Standard Oil of New Jersey), during the years 1946 to 1956.  I opted to examine the records for the town of Cranford, New Jersey, which was very much a suburbanizing town during the period of the first two decades following the war.  These records were organized by street address, and which reveals several things about the buildings of Cranford.  They indicate the size of each building’s oil tank.  The smallest and most common size of these commercial tanks was 275 gallons, and delivery records indicate that they were typically filled between three and five times per year.  Many of the early postwar houses of Cranford were originally small compared to more recent ones, and small compared to the larger houses from the 1920s and before.  The next larger size was 550 gallons, twice the smaller size.  Above that were tanks of 1000 gallons and a few of 2000 gallons.  A few of the larger houses used thousand-gallon tanks, but most of these larger sizes were used in commercial buildings.

The transition to oil heat from coal had begun before the war, and sometimes to records indicate the age of the oil burner.  This can be a clue to the date when a house was converted from coal to oil heat (building department records, if available, might be a more reliable source for this date).  Houses built in the 1920s or before were likely designed for heating by coal.  Houses built after the war would have invariably been designed for oil heat.  The size of the house will correlate with the size of the oil tank, and a study that compared the sizes of the tanks in such records with the appearance of these houses today (as through, say, Google Street View), might reveal the degree to which such houses retain their original footprints or have been enlarged.  Few houses from this period will have survived without significant alteration.  

The records also reveal the makers of the oil burners in most of the houses.  For those of Esso manufacture, the year in which the burner was installed is often also given.  These dates range from the early 1930s through the middle 1950s.  Esso burners were the most popular, but there were many other makes.  Other names, roughly in descending order of popularity, include: Master Kraft, Thatcher, Silent Korth, Quiet Heat, and Rotoflame.  Makes for which there were but a few entries include American Radiator, Arco Steam, Delco, Federal, Hercules, Homart, Mohawk, Petro, Timken Rotary, and York.

The means by which the heat was circulated through the house is also sometimes given.  Some houses were heated by “steam,” meaning through pipes and radiators.  Others were heated by “air,” meaning through ductwork.  The abbreviation A/C is also seen in these records, indicating that at least a few of the customers had installed air conditioning in their homes.  The records do have a few cryptic abbreviations.  “S.H.W.” referred to the presence of a “summer hot water” system, and a number of the houses did not have one.

—Robert Craig