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If you want a great family history conversation starter for the Christmas holidays, mention that Ancestry.com now has almost 100 years’ worth of Sears catalogs online—and keep a pen and paper or a recorder handy.

I gave the collection (and the conversation) a trial run with my family over Thanksgiving. I mentioned that we had the catalogs coming online, asked if my grandparents had ever bought anything from them, and that was all it took.

Clothes and shoes were the big purchases for my dad and his siblings, who grew up in a small farm town. My brother said the garden tractor he’d had restored ought to be in the 1960 catalog (it is).

You could find a Brass King washboard like the one down in the basement…

or a roaster like the one that had cooked our turkey earlier in the day…

or maybe the folding campstools my other grandpa had in his garage (on sale for 88 cents!)…

or the washtub that hung on the old house up town.

But they were just getting started. My grandmother’s been gone for 15 years, but my aunts started talking about how much she loved her first washing machine. And  remember the glasses that used to come in the laundry detergent? There were probably still some in the cupboards out in the kitchen. And how many S&H green stamps had they licked? And what about Aunt Eva and the family who had stayed in Star Valley? They had probably ordered a lot more from the catalogs. And did anybody remember actually putting the catalogs to their final, practical use before the indoor plumbing…

The Sears catalogs aren’t traditional records full of names and dates, though I could probably use them to put a price on just about anything in the house and a picture to so many stories from the past: the old ice box,

my great-grandfather’s buggy and horse tack, the crock Grandma used for her legendary pickles, Mom’s dancing gown and shoes. What those catalogs are actually full of are memories—and they can make a great starting place for jogging old ones and generating some new.