Lauren writes in with a cautionary tale about relying on your gift registry to help you keep tabs of all the people you need to send thank-you notes for wedding gifts. She was married about a year ago and had finally gotten around to sending out her belated thank-yous when she discovered the registry info was wiped clean from Target’s system.

She writes:

My husband and I were married August in 2009. No honeymoon for us – we came home so I could get back to work at my busy job. Life happened, as it does: holidays, a death in the family, busy times… It wasn’t until this July that I could finally sit down and devote the attention to the thank you card process that it required. We sorted the cards and what packing slips we could as well as printing off the amazon.com gift registry we had (since they had a universal registry option).

I pulled up target.com to do the same, only to find that my registry was missing. I called to ask them to send me the registry info, it didn’t need to be reinstated… I just needed addresses and names. It was at this time that I was informed that my registry had been inactive since November and there was no way to retrieve this information. Nothing to be done.

I’m beside myself. Surely, people who had been married before had been involved with the process of setting up Target’s Club Wedd. Shutting down a registry so shortly after a wedding makes so little sense. Culturally, people are usually given a year to acknowledge wedding gifts. I asked myself, “Had I missed where they said they’d shut it down so quickly after the wedding?”

I set up a dummy registry just to see if I’d missed any mention of this. I hadn’t. There’s no fine print, no nothing. And even still… does it make ANY sense to out and out delete someone’s records of gifts sent to them with no warning?! If I had known, you bet I would have been there printing the HELL out of that list. Even with the best organization of packing slips… the nature of wedding as they are, you might miss someone. I can say I feel fairly confident that I have all my packing slips, but I’d hate to upset a new family because I trusted Target to be sensible about the whole thing.

I hope if anything that this will bring some attention to the problem. My recommendation to Target: email the registry “owner” a list of names and email address for the gifts or, HECK, just let them know they plan to delete it. It’s just the right thing to do.

Hey, readers who have recently ruined their lives or plan to do so soon, what do your gift registries do for you in terms of record keeping?

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