General delivery ...missing person

I got into one of those "whatever happened to...."moods , and I found the individual with an address of "general delivery" .... and, of course, the name of the city.    This appears to be a long term address.  I assume that this means the individual is homeless.  Are there other reasonable explinations?

Other options:

- the person travels/moves a lot. Rather than constantly changing their address, they get their mail general delivery.

- the person really doesn't want anyone to know their address.

John F Dean wrote:I got into one of those "whatever happened to...."moods , and I found the individual with an address of "general delivery" .... and, of course, the name of the city.    This appears to be a long term address.  I assume that this means the individual is homeless.  Are there other reasonable explinations?

I used to do that when I was hitching around a lot.  More recently we used general delivery for a train trip where we were going to be in one town for a couple weeks at a time. Seems like that was Monterey or Santa Cruz?

and seems like my address was a gen. delivery when I first moved down here? I lived in a cabin without a local mailing address and no money for a post office box.

Not sure if it would only mean homeless now?  might still mean 'no fixed address'.

There are people around here that live out in the bush. Obviously no mail delivery there. Usually you would just get a PO box at the nearest postal outlet, but sometimes the smaller outlets have a limited numbers of boxes and are pretty picky about who gets one. They'll limit it to people who live right in the community, excluding surrounding areas or something similar. If they're nice, they'll let you get your mail sent there general delivery, rather than making you go into town and find an actual post office and pay for a box there.

Hi Judith,

I used General Delivery when I was building my cabin in MN. I went there is stretches of 4 to 6 weeks for a couple of years. But, I have a long term regular address and my GD address was only short term.  This seems to be a much longer use.

Hi Jan

Thanks for the answer. In this case, this is a community of 200,000 or so.

I lived in town A where there is no mail delivery downtown; but my post office was in town B. if I wanted a package and didn't want to drive to town B I would have it delivered general delivery to town A .

Its a general "Will Call" address, I don't know how long USPS will hold this kind of mail but usually several months.
When your traveling without phones as long as someone has your itinerary they can post a generic note to contact home base over several thousand miles of travel, at postcard rates.