Introduction: Gena Philibert-Ortega is a genealogist and author
of the book “From the Family Kitchen.” In this guest blog post,
Gena writes about the women volunteers in the Salvation Army
during WWI, the “lassies,” who served doughnuts to the American
troops on the front lines. Do you have an ancestor that fought
in World War I? As genealogists, the mention of that war brings
to mind the World War I Draft Registration. Those draft
registration cards provide some important clues for researchers,
but one question I always have is: what was life like for our
ancestors back in WWI? What was day-to-day life like for our
soldiering ancestors? To invoke a much-used quote originated
during the American Civil War, “war is hell.” During that
hellish time in the trenches of WWI, however, there were groups
trying to make soldiers’ lives a little less difficult. For
those Americans who served on the front lines in France, one
good experience of the war might have had nothing at all to do
with warfare. It was something th