GenClub
Episode 2
October 2025
For this episode of GenClub the panel read:
The First Time I Met Estella &
A Plate Dinner for a Summer Evening
by Julie Dove.
We invite you to read the posts before or after you watch the episode. Leave a comment on Julie’s them! We’d love to know what you think too.
Julie Dove
Author of A Sense of Occasion
Julie Dove is a writer and researcher fascinated by the way food connects us across time. In 2006, she moved into an abandoned house in eastern Washington and discovered 212 vintage cookbooks hidden in a kitchen cabinet. What started as a curiosity became an obsession: Who was the woman who left them behind?
With a storyteller’s heart and a researcher’s drive, she has spent years piecing together the life of Estella —a woman with no children, no memoir, and no recorded history—through recipes, newspaper clippings, and the gatherings she once hosted.
Now, through A Sense of Occasion, she explores food, memory, and the quiet ways women’s legacies endure.
When she’s not deep in historical research or baking from century-old recipes, Julie is hosting themed board game nights, watching film noir, or hitting the road with her husband in search of the next great food adventure.
Find her at A Sense of Occasion where she shares Estella’s story, one
cookbook at a time.
Meet the GenClub Panel:
Jane Chapman
I’ve been researching family history since the early 1990’s and incorporating DNA evidence since 2013. In 2024 I started a one-place study. My Substack publications mainly draw on material from my Websites on the weare.xyz platform
Lynda Heines
I’m a writer, a textile artist, a genealogist, an iris lover, and a cat herder. My sis’ death in 2023 pulled me back into writing about my ancestors and my life journey. My hubby, two cats, and I live on a small piece of land in Newburgh, Indiana.
Anne Wendel
Teenage genealogist turned retired reading teacher living on Anne time now! Summer vacation every day. Read, blog, research, find cousins, live on ancestors’ land. Goals for rest of life: be pro genealogist, write my Roots, rebuild my Rev War house.
Lisa Maguire
Your family has a story. Your family were makers of history. ancestory is the place where family stories and history meet.
I’m your host, Robin Stewart. Thank you for watching!
