Historical Christmas Catalogs

It is Christmas shopping season and the season of children making their Christmas lists. Today, I'd imagine many children have their own Amazon accounts where they can create their Christmas lists, or their parents may log in and allow the children to search and browse and create their lists.

I remember as a child the enormous pleasure I and my siblings had, paging through the Christmas catalogs every year. From around Thanksgiving until the days leading up to Christmas, we'd browse through the JC Penney and Spiegel Christmas Catalogs and the "Sears Wishbook" and Wards "Christmas Book". The first time through, we'd just look and read the descriptions. We'd make notes about the items we considered putting onto our Christmas list along with their page numbers. Then we'd go through again, this time really studying the pictures and descriptions to see what we really wanted. The first list was always the longest, then, as we got closer and closer to Christmas, we'd narrow down that list to what we really wanted.

Menke Extended Family Photos

I missed my normal second blog post last month. I'm sorry! I have, for nearly seven years, posted at least two blog posts every single month. Last month, I was incredibly busy with work and family and could not come up with any ideas for a second blog post. So, I apologize for falling down on the job. Even now, I'm having a difficult time finding a subject to post about. I've made no progress in finding anything new for a while. This morning, I logged in to Family Search and looked at the alerts Family Search provided for my extended family. I don't normally spend much time looking at these alerts but today I did. There were a few photos posted of my extended Menke family, including some from my "long lost" Menke family that ended up in Nuckolls County, Nebraska. I've never had any photos of this branch of the family, so I thought this would make a good post.