Book Shelf: Women's Work - The First 20,000 Years

During the excavation of L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland when a Viking-style spindle whorl was discovered, the archeologists broke out the bottle of champagne they had reserved for significant finds because it was proof that at least one woman had been there 1,000 years ago.*

The history of spinning and weaving fabric is a very long one and it was always women's work.

[Source: Amazon.com]

So if you want to picture the daily life of your distant female ancestors, it's a pretty safe bet that they were producing cloth (as Homer describes Helen of Troy doing in both the Iliad and the Odyssey).




*I'm currently reading The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown who looks at what we can know about a woman named Gudrid who is believed to have given birth to the first baby of European descent in North America. Homespun is described as "the Viking culture's chief export."


© 2018 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Book Shelf: Jamestown People to 1800

Deciding that it's time to take a closer look at my father's Warren lineage and its Virginia roots, I ordered Martha W. McCartney's 2012 book Jamestown People to 1800: Landowners, Public Officials, Minorities, and Native Leaders via Amazon and it arrived this morning.

[Amazon.com]

I already own another book by this author.


© 2018 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Book Shelf: Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers: A Biographical Dictionary, 1607-1635

If you have ancestors who arrived in Virginia in the early years of the colony, Martha W. McCartney provides an excellent place to begin your research.

It's available as new or used from Amazon or you can purchase the e-book through Google.


© 2018 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

You Can Buy a Replica of the Sears Catalog on Amazon.com

No big surprise here, isn't almost everything now on Amazon?  Just seems kinda meta, since the Sears Roebuck catalog was the Amazon of its day.

Cyber Monday and Cyber Week sales enticements got me looking at Amazon the past few days.  So much stuff, so little money!

Being genealogically oriented, I naturally wondered what shopping was like in the past and thought about Sears (and about Montgomery Ward, it's older rival, both original to Chicago) and it's historical importance for the mail order industry which lead to the ultimate development of online retail giants like Amazon.  Sears Roebuck catalogs had an amazing selection (available at Ancestry's Historic Catalogs of Sears, Roebuck and Co., 1896-1993) of goods available to American consumers:

In a lot of ways warehouses don't change although the technology that Amazon uses for quick fulfillment was impossible back then, of course.

Sears Roebuck Hardware Department (Fall 1897 catalog).

Clothing Department (Fall 1897 Catalog)

Department of Boots, Shoes, and Rubbers (Fall 1897 Catalog).

Amazon warehouse (location unknown) (Robert Galbraith/Reuters image) from Business Insider's article "See what it's like inside Amazon's massive warehouses."

Dallas Amazon.com fulfillment center (from Amazon.com fulfillment center bringing 1,500 jobs to Dallas)

There were pages of testimonials published in the catalog (Fall 1897).  Sears controlled the message in this case to their advantage, as to be expected.

Amazon not only has a space for testimonials and reviews (one of their most compelling features in my opinion), but doesn't control the message, as evidenced by the tongue-in-cheek critical review of the 1897 Sears Roebuck Catalog.  We live in a much more amusing time!

© 2016 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.