Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

The Eastland Survivors and the Case of the Missing Bylines

• Natalie Zett • Season 4 • Episode 136

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Memory can vanish quietly—sometimes with a server shutdown. This week, we open the door to the Eastland disaster’s online past: from an early researcher’s dial-up “postcard pages” to an early Eastland website’s now-defunct archive. We trace how those pioneering digital efforts shaped what many of us think we know today.

Along the way, we revisit transportation historian George Hilton’s foundational work—his flexible approach to casualty counts and the permissions that seeded the first online lists. We also explain why numbers in mass tragedies should stay open to revision, not carved in stone.

Then we bring three family voices back into the light:

  • Ole Nicholas Jensen, rescuer and survivor.
  • Mary Vrba Lippert, whose resilience carried her from a Wisconsin farm to Western Electric.
  • Frieda Emma Amelia Till, saved at 17 and determined to build a full life after that harrowing experience.

Their stories—once carefully attributed online—eventually lost their bylines or  disappeared from view.  We talk about how that happens, how to restore them, and why proper citations and links aren’t pedantry—they’re respect.

This is a story about historiography, ethics, and repair: using the Internet Archive, public history standards, and persistence to restore authorship, correct omissions, and make the record more trustworthy for descendants, educators, and curious listeners.

If you love genealogy, history, or digital preservation, you’ll find both practical guidance and renewed purpose—along with a cautionary tale.

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Natalie Zett:

Hello, I'm Natalie Zett, and welcome to Flower in the River. This podcast, inspired by my book of the same name, explores the 1915 Eastland disaster in Chicago and its enduring impact, particularly on my family's history. We'll explore the intertwining narratives of others impacted by this tragedy as well. And we'll dive into writing and genealogy and uncover the surprising supernatural elements that surface in family history research. Come along with me on this journey of discovery. Hey, this is Natalie, and welcome to episode 136 of Flower in the River. And I hope you're doing well. For this week, we are continuing our dive into historiography, or putting it simply, the history of how the history of the Eastland disaster has been written, shaped, and shared over time. We'll look at what happened in the late 20th and early twenty first centuries, and how my recent coursework in public history has inspired this closer look. Specifically, we are returning to the now defunct Eastland Memorial Society website, many pages of which have been preserved on the Internet Archives Wayback Machine. Lucky for us. But let's step back. There was a website, if you want to call it that, before the Eastland Memorial website. Did you know that? I bet you didn't, unless you were around in the late 90s. This is a history of early internet stuff. So the very first Eastland online archive was long before social media or even websites as we know websites were a thing. There was a researcher named Mary Bonneval. I've talked about her previously, and she created probably the first online tribute to the Eastland disaster. Mary had no connection to the Eastland disaster via family. I know that because she and I were writing at that point. But she was intrigued with ships, and she enjoyed collecting postcards of these old ships. She brilliantly decided to share her collection. What she did is she compiled her postcards of the Eastland disaster, began researching it, and her first Eastland pages lived on Novagate.net. That was one of those early dial-up home pages that came with your internet account back in the 1990s. If you can imagine a world before blogs and before social media, that was the world in which she was working. So she gathered stories, survivor lists, and historical links at a time when no one else was doing that type of work. What happened was many educators and history enthusiasts linked to her pages, including me, these pages became the foundation for what would later evolve into an organization called the Eastland Memorial Society, and they too created a digital archive. With Mary continuing her writing, I think she did most of the writing. I don't know all the details of that transition. I literally know that one day Mary's old site had disappeared and had become this. And I'll talk about some of the discoveries of this actual organization in later episodes because it's a fascinating look into that era. When that organization was no more, and it was sometime early in the 21st century. And I'll talk about that later on. This history, like so much history of the Eastland disaster, was in danger of disappearing again. So I have been slowly restoring it with proper attribution on my own website. Why does this matter? Well, at the time, Mary and others who became eventually became part of this Eastland Memorial Society were in contact with or working with George Hilton. George Hilton, of course, was a transportation historian who wrote Eastland, Legacy of the Titanic in 1995, and it is still the most thorough and balanced study of the disaster ever published. And he gave them permission to use his casualty list and other supporting materials on their website. They took his original list of victims, that's in Appendix D of his book, and they put it online and they annotated it with additional information, so they were all continuing to do research. And in fact, as I've mentioned in earlier episodes, George Hilton, historian that he was, never intended for that number of victims that he found to be fixed in stone. And when a death toll turns into a publicity device, it discourages truth seeking and it also discourages further research and scholarship. Hilton, like all of us who do history or genealogy, we know history is alive and new information is emerging all the time. You're constantly being given new information, and you have to add that information, even if it blows up one of your pet theories. So Hilton encouraged people to expand on his work, and that's what many of us who have come after him have tried to do. So speaking of which, just a couple of weeks ago, my research led me to claims and libel files from 1915, where I found a victim of the Eastland disaster that would be Thomas Marin, who was omitted from Hilton's original list. And then when that list was copied, that omission was never corrected. And it seems that those who used Hilton's list did not do the research. Otherwise, they would have easily found Thomas Marin and added him to the list. So Thomas Marin's name changes that locked-in casualty number that we keep hearing. And he's not the last person to, there will be more discoveries of that, I am sure. In the meantime, I recreated that list and I added the additional name that was omitted for so many years, and it's as up to date as it can be. In a mass casualty event like the Eastland disaster, it's not advisable to lock that history into a hard-coded number. You always want to leave space for truth to keep emerging because the story is still unfolding through records, descendants, and new discoveries. If you've been listening to this podcast, you know I've already found two people who died years after the Eastland disaster, but who became ill after being in that water that day of the disaster. Are they counted in any casualty list? They are not. Should they have been? Well, that's a question that should have been answered a long time ago. Well, I want to publicly thank the folks who were once upon a time responsible for creating the Eastland Memorial Society. What they did, even though it's dated, it's over 25 years old now, as I'm pulling information from it, you would be surprised, as I have been, at how detailed it is and how much documentation is in there. What's interesting, though, is that many people and organizations who came after the Eastland Memorial Society didn't seem to build on what this organization started. That's one of the reasons I'm recreating whatever pages of theirs I can find. Any of us who are doing anything in our lives, we all stand on the shoulders of other people and other organizations in this case. And it's very important to give tribute to who helped you on the way. The other thing that this organization did, and we'll talk about that later, is that they hosted or participated in various Eastland memorial gatherings. I found two programs from 2001 and 2015. There may have been more. I need to do more research about that. But these events brought together survivors who were still living at that time and other family members and others who were involved. But in terms of their website, what stands out is that the Eastland Memorial Society also invited people to share their memories or the memories of their families who were involved in the Eastland disaster. They published these stories with attribution, meaning they have the writer's name, they have the date it was published. I used to take that for granted that anyone would do that, but that's not been the case. And I so appreciate this kind of professionalism and scholarship, because again, you take things for granted. Because they did this 25, 26 years ago, that makes the work of today's researchers, of which I am one, so much easier. And that hasn't been the case with many who've come after them and tried to document the history of the people of the Eastland disaster. We're supposed to cite our sources and document where we got this information from because, well, it's ethical, and in some cases, if you lift something and don't give proper attribution, you could be accused of plagiarism, and nobody wants that. That's a writer's worst fear. And since it's very personal to me, I lost somebody on the Eastland disaster. Here's the other reason I take great pains to document where I got information from. It's out of respect for those people who have gone before us. And the other thing about these accounts from 25, 26 years ago, is that many of the people who wrote those accounts have also passed away, so you understand why this is so important. Their words were in danger of disappearing when the society's website went dark. So in this episode, I want to make sure that these stories are not lost again, and I'm going to share a few biographies with you. And what I so appreciate about the Eastland Memorial Society is that they did not edit, they did not rewrite, but they shared it as it was written in the writer's own voice, and they gave proper attribution. That is going to come up again and again. It's under the category passenger biographies. For your information, this person's story was never brought forward. They are not even mentioned in any subsequent Eastland books or online sites. This is also why this story is very important. Ole Nicholas Jensen submitted by Richard Jensen, 1999. My grandfather, Oli Nicholas Jensen, was a survivor and a rescuer. Ole was born in Denmark in 1880 and came to the U.S. at the age of nine, around 1889. After a short stay in New York or New Jersey, he lived in Chicago the rest of his life. He was on the excursion by himself that day, even though he was married with a wife and two young sons at the time, one of them, my father. He retired from Western Electric in 1945 and died in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1962 at the age of 82. He didn't talk about the Eastland too much. He always said that the boat rolled on its side when everybody rushed over to wave goodbye to those on the dock. A theory that was probably not complete, but he lived for another 47 years believing that this is what had happened. He was below deck, on the port side, and had to pile furniture up to crawl out a porthole. After hoisting himself onto the hull, he helped pull many people from the water. Then he spent many hours identifying the bodies of his co-workers at the makeshift morgue. The family back home in Jefferson Park had heard of the tragedy and were very worried about his well-being until my grandfather finally walked into the yard where my father and uncle were playing. I grew up thinking it was quite normal for my grandfather to have survived a steamship disaster. We actually had a next-door neighbor in Elmhurst, Illinois, when I was very young, whose sisters reportedly had survived the Titanic. This is why steamship disasters seemed normal enough to me when I was young. So that's the end of Richard Jensen's article about his grandfather, Oli Nicholas Jensen. It was published in 1999. This is yet another example of a treasure of a story about not just a witness, but a hero. And it was shared by his grandson. And that is incredible, but it's also concerning that somehow, even though this story was shared, as time passed, it was lost or ignored, but it does not appear in any recent Eastland disaster websites or books. So I want to make sure to bring this back and bring it forward because this family too deserves recognition. I mean, Richard Jensen went to all that trouble to share his grandfather's memories, and I'm sure that he thought that it was taken care of, and it was for a while until it wasn't. I couldn't find too much out about Oly Jensen, but I did find his brief obituary. This is from the Indianapolis News, September third, nineteen sixty two. Ole N. Jensen. Services for Ole and Jensen eighty three, Chicago will be at the John V. May Funeral Home, Chicago, followed by cremation. He died Saturday in community hospital. He had been visiting a son, Theodore O. Jensen, four hundred three oh eight Thornley. Born in Denmark, Mr. Jensen had retired as a Western Electric Company employee and of obituary. So no mention of the Eastland disaster, no way to know that Ole was connected to the Eastland disaster other than the fact that his grandson wrote this article. We will continue with the next biography that originally appeared on the Eastland Memorial Society website under Passenger Biographies. This biography is for Mary Lippert, Ney Vraba, and it was submitted by Glenn Lippert in 1999. She was born 1894 on a small farm owned by my grandfather, Victor Vraba, near the small town of Coloma, Wisconsin. She was the eldest of seven children. When her mother, Anna, died at an early age, Mary then became the quote-unquote mother of her six siblings. At that time in history, rural folks had to be self-sufficient, but neighbor would help neighbors. As they grew older, her mother duties came to an end, and it was her time to start a life for herself. She then left for Chicago, and all that her father, Victor, said was, quote, don't let me hear anything bad about you. She came to Chicago alone and started working at the Western Electric Plant. She was in her early 20s and single. She at the time was living in Maywood, Illinois. She was one of the lucky survivors of the Eastland disaster. She never spoke about the incident much and always downplayed it. She was in the water, and a man from an adjacent office building threw her a life preserver. She took a hold of it and paddled over to the dock and climbed up a makeshift ladder. When asked about what she did once on dry land, she answered that she was soaking wet, got on board a streetcar, and went home. It was after the disaster she met Edward E. Lippert. In due course, they married and had three children. The oldest, Donald, died at an early age before the other two were born. Later, a son, Glenn, followed by a daughter, Carol, made up her family. She had great pride in the Western Electric. She earnestly wanted Glenn to work there. During the days of World War II, he applied for work there while he was waiting for his 17th birthday to enlist in the Navy. The noise in their punch press department, where the presses were as tall as a one-story building, was so loud and never-ending, he quit before even starting. To some extent, this broke her heart a little. Needless to say, she had a fear of water. She didn't like Glenn going into the Navy. Her fear was further compounded while he was aboard ship overseas. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage out in the middle of the lake, and by the time they reached the shore, he was dead. This compounded her fear together with the fact that Glenn was participating in the invasion of Okinawa, subject to kamikaze attacks. The war ended. As her children married, she became the grandmother of twelve. She lived most of her adult life in Chicago, Elmwood Park, Melrose Park, and the balance of her elderly life in a retirement home in Elgin. If she were alive today, she would be the great-grandmother of nine and great-great-grandmother of two. As people of the Eastland, this account is both precious and valuable. Sadly, Glenn is no longer with us, but I'm so glad that he left this story for us to find. It acts as a through line to that time and to his family. Here's another unusual thing about Mary's bio. It mentioned that she was born near Kiloma, Wisconsin. Now, one of the strangest things about this podcast is that for a while, Coloma, Wisconsin, population under 500. That's my highest listenership, if you want to call it that. I have no personal connection to Coloma that I know of, but it looks like the whole town is listening. Well, Coloma, I did put out an APB and encourage people to contact me because I'm dying to know what is this? Anyway, now we have another Kaloma Wisconsin connection. Do you think it's too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence? I don't know. The original biography of Mary Lippert, Ne Vraba, was written by her grandson back in nineteen ninety nine. This is an example of early digital storytelling at its finest, I think. But here's what happened. Years later, vestiges of that same piece reappeared elsewhere, stripped of the writer's name and flattened into a short anonymous summary. The story's heart, the family's own voice, seems to be missing. Genealogist and historian Elizabeth Schoen Mills, who I quote a lot and for some very good reasons, she's one of the most respected voices in our field. And she is also the author of Evidence Explained. Elizabeth has written extensively about this type of problem. In her talk, Genealogical Research and Writing, Are You a Saint, a Sinner, or Bum Fuzzled Soul? That's her word, bum fuzzled. I like that. In that article, she walks through the many ways writers, genealogists, historians, and researchers can cross ethical lines without even realizing it. And then she lists different types invisible quoting, patchworking, that means putting different articles together and passing it off as original, by the way, borrowing footnotes and tweaking someone else's words as if they were our own. Her message is simple. What's legal isn't always ethical, and tweaking someone else's words doesn't make them yours. Unfortunately, this has happened a lot in the subsequent Eastland biographies and stories. Another thing that I've noticed in some of these derivative materials is the tacking on of a copyright tag like copyright, Chicago Tribune, with no date, no author, and no verifiable source. At first glance it looks official, but it actually muddies the trail. So that's not a real citation. At first glance it can look like that, but there's no way for anyone to verify whether or not this information is true because you don't know where it came from. And that is an ongoing problem that I've run into with this. Fortunately, though, there's always good news. AI and different types of tools allow you to do a deeper search, and you can often find the source for this borrowed quote-unquote material. And so that's what I try to do. I try to get to the original primary source and get it in there so other researchers who come after me can look it up, verify it, or find counterinformation or whatever is out there. Otherwise, if you do a vague citation like this, copyright, plain dealer, copyright, Chicago Tribune, and don't have a date, at least annotate the article or the image that way. Say something like, unable to locate date, but this was sourced from, and then list the source where you got this from. List where you did get it from, and then maybe somebody else can locate the primary source. If we don't do this, it's tantamount to fiction and Elizabeth Schoen Mills would say plagiarism. This kind of thing is exactly what ethical standards in genealogy and public history are meant to prevent. So as the result of these kinds of findings, which I've seen quite a bit of, and as the result of my current studies in public history, I am in the midst of writing about my discoveries for an academic journal. So believe me, I'm also reacquainting myself with all of these professional guidelines because it's so easy to slip over into doing something not ethical without even realizing it. And it's a good reminder that our work, whether it's independent or institutional, carries a responsibility to those stories we tell. And I've said it before in this episode, and I'll say it again. Not only is my family involved in the Eastland disaster, so many other families were also involved, and they deserve to have their stories, their families treated with respect. And last but not least, our third biography is that of Friday Emma Amelia Till, submitted by Lorraine D. Robinson, 1999. It originally appeared on the Eastland Memorial Society website. Frida was born on June 20th, 1897, in Chicago, the daughter of Carl and Augusta Clot Till. Carl Till came to America from Prussia at the age of ten months. In 1873, and settled on the north side of Chicago. He later moved to Belmont, Illinois, in DuPage County. She was an employee of Western Electric Company and was looking forward to the annual company picnic. When the Eastland capsized, Frida was dangling in the water, hanging by her clothing that had caught on the railing. After she was saved by a Chicago fireman, she saw the firemen spread ashes on the side of the Eastland, trying to make it possible for people to hand over hand on a rope from boat to land, but she could not do this. There were others near her who she felt did not make it through the accident, but she knew no names. It was a harrowing experience for her as she was approximately 17 years of age when this happened. She often related her fear of water and how she had survived the sinking of the Eastland. Her thought on the cause of the turnover was the result of a City of Chicago fireboat that went alongside of the Eastland, making passengers run to one side of the boat for a better sight, thus upsetting the ballast. Frida married Peter F. Helder on March 29, 1919. They had two daughters, Lorraine Dorothy Robinson and Doris Ann Thomas. Frida and Peter lived in Chicago until 1932, then moved to the small town suburb Oaklawn. Frida then went back into the workforce and was the manager of the Children's Shoe Department of Sears at 63rd and Halstead Streets in Chicago. She worked there long enough to be invested in their retirement program. The family then moved further south to live where Lorraine had located in Frankfurt, Illinois. Frida lived there after the death of Peter and moved into an apartment in the center of town. She occupied her time by joining the German Evangelical Lutheran Church and becoming a member of their Lady's Aids Society. She involved herself in church work, often setting up the Sunday services needed for communion. Frida had three grandchildren. Frida passed away March 28, 1977, and is buried in Fairmont Cemetery. And then there is a photo of Frida. So Frida's biographical information, like so many others, does not appear anywhere other than on this website, the Eastland Memorial Society, and now in this podcast. So there's still a lot more information from the Eastland Memorial Society's old website, which is available on the Internet Archive via its Way Back Machine. And I will share more information in the coming weeks about my discoveries because there's a lot there that maybe explains what happened to the Eastland disaster retellings in the 21st century. In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed getting to know some of these people. And I hope you have a great week. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other. I'll talk to you soon. Hey, that's it for this episode, and thanks for coming along for the ride. Please subscribe or follow so you can keep up with all the episodes. And for more information, please go to my website. That's www.flowerinthher.com. I hope you'll consider buying my book available as audiobook, ebook, paperback, and hardcover because I still owe people money, and that's my running joke. But the one thing I'm serious about is that this podcast and my book are dedicated to the memory of all who experienced the Eastland disaster of nineteen fifteen. Goodbye for now.

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Natalie Zett

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