June 2025 GenTales Newsletter
In North America, we’re welcoming summer. Mother Nature has been a little hesitant here in northern New Hampshire, but today is gorgeous and I’m grateful to see the sun.
This is the last monthly GenTales on Medium newsletter — I’m going to change the schedule to every 2 months so the newsletters are worth reading.
I had thought I’d just skip this one and come at you in July but we had a great article by Paul van Gool that I couldn’t wait to share with you in case you missed it.
So let’s dive into that one, and then I have a writing prompt/call for submissions at the end.
Articles from May
wrote about the Arolsen Archives — a way to track family who were imprisoned by the Nazis in World War II.
In How to Research Ancestors from World War II, Paul outlines how:
You can find documents about the concentration camps that your ancestors were sent to, where they were put to work, and, if applicable, their death certificate. These documents often contain information about their date and place of birth, their family, and where they were living. As such, they might be of help for your research.
And the Archives aren’t just genealogical — they offer ways to find names that may be missing from history.
And when you find your ancestor thought lost? Tell their story! You can do that by submitting to GenTales, or you can record it for posterity.
I wrote about how easy it is to start using video to tell genealogy stories:
There isn’t a huge gain in quality by spending a lot of money. You just have to play with the options within the software available to you and decide what’s going to work best for your situation.
You can find examples of what I’ve been doing with video here or here.
Writing Prompts
What are your family’s summer traditions?
- Common vacation spots?
- Barbecue or picnic foods?
- Ways to keep cool?
Do you have a great story about your ancestors and summer?
For example, during the summer we always brought out the grill and cooked on the back porch. We didn’t have air conditioning, so the kitchen got hot making the salads and sides. My maternal grandmother’s potato salad was part of that summer tradition. I submitted that recipe as part of a collaborative storytelling cookbook put together by Lori Olson White at Substack. You can get a free copy here.
Grandma’s potato salad and her other recipes were what I call Depression-era fare. They’re simple with limited ingredients they would have had easy access to during the early to mid-20th century in rural America. I still make them and love them. I might to have to write an article about them.
Have a great June and July! Read our submission guidelines here and check out previous calls for submissions from this reading list — all of which are free to read.
