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Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Nowadays, you can get almost anything shipped to you.

Clothing, groceries, toilet paper.

If it fits in a box, you can travel by airplane or truck or even by a drone, it can probably ship.

But there's one thing that you can't have delivered anymore that was a totally normal

thing to send in the mail in the early

1900s. Any guesses? Kids! That's right. Kids! No, you couldn't wrap them up in bubble wrap and seal

them in a box. But back in the days when travel was expensive and postage was cheap, it was perfectly

legal for parents to mail their children.

The children were carried or walked along by the mailman to their relatives.

They could also be sent by train.

The service cost a few nickels for postage, though the optional insurance was much more.

The storious of these children turned freight

are collected at the National Postal Museum.

Though records are scarce,

the museum's archives identified

the first child ever sent through the mail

as a 10-pound infant boy

whose parents mailed him a mile away

to Grandma's house in 1913.

Just a year later,

...