Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

The Afterlife of a Story

• Natalie Zett • Season 4 • Episode 138

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What happens when the storyteller is gone—but the story keeps rewriting itself?

A single family biography can carry the weight of a neighborhood’s memory. We open the archives on a 20-year-old Western Electric employee who boarded the Eastland with her fiancé in 1915—and trace how her story, first written by a family member, nearly disappeared under paraphrase and missing attribution.

What begins as a personal account of loss becomes a blueprint for preserving authorship, provenance, and trust across the fragile web.

What began as a family story became a case study in restoring authorship and digital integrity.

We walk through the dynamic immigrant life of Cicero, the morning the Eastland rolled into the Chicago River, and the sibling who arrived just as the ship capsized.

Alongside those details, we share how we traced the original 1999 article, found the author’s later blog posts, and mapped the path of unattributed copies that flattened key context.

If you love genealogy, public history, or deep research, this episode offers a practical toolkit:

•Time-stamped archiving with the Wayback Machine and Archive.Today

•Side-by-side document comparison

•A clear-eyed approach to AI that favors verification over automation

We close by restoring the story—and the storyteller’s name—to its rightful place.

Recognizing the author isn’t optional—it’s about respecting ownership, upholding ethics, and protecting the record for those who follow.

Resources:

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 138 of Flower in the River. This week we will return to the archives of the late great Eastland Memorial Society's website because there are more biographies that I want to share with you. I wish they had more time to have done more biographies, but the ones that they have done are gold. So I want to share a story with you about a victim of the Eastland disaster. And I also will share the historiography of that particular article. Historiography is simply the history of the history. In other words, I'm going to tell you what happened to that article after it was published. What I will do is take you through the steps that I took to restore this article to its original form. And if you've been listening to the podcast, you know this type of pattern is common when it comes to the biographies of the people of the Eastland disaster. I often find the original article in an earlier newspaper or publication, and then I find a semblance of the writing or photographs with provenance removed, with no source citations. And that makes it really difficult to do the research, but help is on the way. I will also tell you about how I have been using artificial intelligence tools, not just to research, but also to restore the biographies of so many of these people. So let's go back to the Eastland Memorial website. Again, this is accessed from the Internet Archives Wayback Machine. And this is an article written in 1999. It is by Colleen Ringel. The title of the article is Gabriella and then in quotes Ella Schlenz, S-C-H-L-E-N-T-Z. Gabriella Schlenz, or Ella as she was known to her family and friends, was the eldest child of Gabriella and Peter Schlenz. Peter was a bailiff for either the Cook County or Chicago courts. Both of her parents were immigrants to the United States, arriving as children from Luxembourg. They lived on the west side of Chicago in a suburb called Cicero. This was a neighborhood of primarily immigrant families from Germany, Poland, Bohemia, now the Czech Republic, and other Eastern European countries in the late 1800s. The biggest employer of the area was Western Electric, their Hawthorne plant, which made telephone parts. This was an area of people who were relatively new to the United States and tended to be very close friends and family. A type of neighborhood that we do not see much of anymore, where everyone knew everyone else. Kids played in the streets together, and families had many connections to each other, either as families or as immigrants to a new land. Ella and her brother Harry both worked at Western Electric. The day of the disaster, the two of them had made arrangements to go to the picnic together. Ella left first with her fiance, John. She was twenty years old and worked as an accountant at the plant. I am not sure what her fiancee did. Ella and John got to the dock and boarded the boat. Harry was late as usual. It was a joke in the family that Harry was born too late for Christmas, December 26th, and he was late for everything ever since. Harry arrived at the dock at the exact moment that the Eastland capsized. He immediately started to help in the rescue, but also was frantically trying to find his sister Ella. In the meantime, word was going out to the city of the disaster. I imagine by radio and word of mouth as survivors and witnesses slowly made their way home in shock. So my great great grandparents heard the news and immediately thought that they had lost children, their two oldest. Peter, because of his connections with the court system, was able to get updates easier than others, but did not get word of his children. My mother recalls her mother, my grandmother, telling her that the family was devastated and in chaos. Finally, several hours later, Harry arrived home to tell his parents that his sister had drowned, but that her fiance had survived. From what I recall being told, Ella drowned because she was pinned by one of the smokestacks or a column, but I cannot confirm that fact. Because of the vast numbers of casualties, it caused a problem in the neighborhood. Again, remember, most of the victims came from the same neighborhood, same churches, etc. The stress on the facilities must have been staggering. There are only so many funeral homes, only so many funerals a church can perform in a day. Ella was not buried until july thirtieth, five days after the disaster. On the list of victims from the disaster, you will find names such as Youngworth, Meyer, Turik, and Immel, names that show up on my family tree as having married into the family. We are pretty sure that they are somehow related to us as sure tail relatives, relatives of people who are relatives by marriage. It was a very sad time. The last remnant of the disaster did prove to be a happy one. Peter Schlenz was convinced that if his daughter had known how to swim, she might have been able to help herself. Starting the following summer, he started taking the family to Cedar Lake, Indiana so the children could begin to learn how to swim and at least get comfortable with water, even if they only learned how to tread water. Several years later, on advice from the judge he was bailiff for, he started taking the family to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, instead of Indiana. Because of this disaster in 1915, my grandmother met my grandfather when they started going to Lake Geneva. So there is sometimes a silver lining in the disaster. This article that you've just listened to was originally published on the Eastland Memorial Society's website in 1999. It was written by Colleen Ringel, and this is about her family and what a rich, fascinating history. We'll talk about what happened to this article after its publication in 1999. But we're not done with Colleen yet. She did some more writing. Unfortunately, Colleen Ringel died in 2016, and something I wrote a couple of years ago came to mind. What happens when those who remember also become a memory themselves? In other words, what happens when the storytellers, the chroniclers die? Well, I'm going to tell you what happened to this one and how I've been working to restore her voice and her work. So a little more research revealed something wonderful. Before she died, Colleen began writing a blog. It was called Family History by Colleen. It's still active, and I'll put a link to it in the show notes. It looked as if she was just getting into genealogy and learning about the various branches of her family, but she didn't have time to finish. These blog posts are dated around 2008 through 2012. There might be some later ones, there might be some earlier ones. And she may have done other writing elsewhere. I need to continue searching for that as well. The article I just read to you, it had heart, didn't it? She let you know how the Eastland disaster affected her family and the neighborhood they lived in. And I'm so grateful that Colleen took the time to write this down and share it. And now we'll make sure that it's preserved and make sure that it's counted as part of the Eastland disaster history. I'm going to read another post that Colleen wrote in her personal blog. This is dated Sunday, April 27, 2008. The title is Eastland Disaster. Many people have heard about the Titanic, but not many have heard of the Eastland. However, if you live in Chicago or Cicero, you certainly have heard of the Eastland. The Eastland was a ship built to sail the Great Lakes. In July 1915, it was hired to transport employees of the Western Electric Company to Michigan City, Indiana for the annual employee picnic. On the morning of July 24, 1915, as the Eastland was loading passengers, it began listing, first to one side and then the other, until it finally tipped over into the Chicago River. Over eight hundred and forty people were killed in this disaster, including Ella Schlenz, daughter of Peter and Gabriella Meyer Schlenz. My grandmother, Ava Anne, was a young girl of eight when her oldest sister was killed in this disaster that affected almost every family living in Cicero. What was the significance of this disaster other than the loss of a family member to the Schlentz family? Peter became convinced that if his daughter Ella knew how to swim, she might have survived, and he decided that the rest of his children would learn how to swim. The family began to take vacations to various lakes so that the family could learn to swim, and finally, after a number of trips to Cedar Lake, Indiana, Peter learned of a place in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where he could rent tents for his family to camp on, property owned by a family with access to the lake. The Schlenses began to camp at the campgrounds of the Van Dyks on the south shore of Geneva Lake. Over the next few years, the oldest Van Dyke child fell in love with the youngest Schlensch child. So we get a bit more of the family intrigue and the information here, and Colleen has a number of other family stories on this blog, and I'll share one more. This one is from April 30th, 2012, titled Exploring the 1940 Census. On Monday, April 2nd, 2012, the National Archives released the 1940 U.S. Federal Population Census after a 72-year embargo. I have spent the last month pouring over the many pages looking for familiar names. How lucky am I that both mom and dad lived in small rural areas that year, making it easier to find them? Mom was really easy since I knew the enumeration district for Lynn Township in 1930 and could use the Stephen Morris One Step website to identify the enumeration district for Lynn Township in 1940. A couple of clicks, six actually, and there they were, the entire Van Dyck family complete with middle names of all the kids, and extra special. Mom was one of the five percent who had extra questions asked. Did I learn anything I didn't know before looking at the census? No, but it was still exciting to see the family living in the house I remember so well. That one page of the nineteen forty census was a windfall of family content as I found Uncle Frank and family, including Pat and Pearl with Irene. Then there was Great Grandpa and Great Grandma Van Dyck, with Aunt Clara living next door with Ellis Mott. Dad was a little tricky to find since the family had moved from Peoria to Washington sometime during the nineteen thirties, but Washington turned out only to have one enumeration district and was quickly located within a few clicks of a mouse. Again, nothing new was learned that wasn't already known. I have found a number of other relatives but still have a way to go. I have found the Henry Ringles in Peoria, Peter Schlenz in Cicero, the Lazarones in Kenosha, and am still looking for the rest of the Schlenz families, the Larisons, the Trincos, and the Hutchersons. And finally, there's a photo of the entire Schlentz family. Next to the photo, Colleen Ringel wrote Not sure what the date is on this photo of the Schlentz family, but it is definitely after 1915. That is Gabriella Meyer and Peter in the front, surrounded by their surviving children. Hattie, Wally, Agnes, Harry, and Ava, and of course Ava is Colleen's grandmother. So that's the end of Colleen's writing as far as I could locate. We'll keep looking as well. Here's what seemed to have happened, and this is part of following the trail of how the history of the people of the Eastland disaster has been handled. So, while searching the internet for Colleen Ringle to see if there was anything else that she had written, I located sections of Colleen's original article that appear to have been adapted or replicated on another website. My biggest concern about this article that I found was that the authorship had been removed. So serendipity worked in my favor and in Colleen's favor because had I not found that first article, I would have no clue as to this later article's origin. The curious thing though was instead of including the original article with the proper attributions, they removed the author and paraphrased it. The paraphrase was not as interesting. I've seen this a lot with the history of the people of the Eastland disaster. Certainly much of my podcast is about just that. And this type of omission may be the reason why the Eastland itself has not gotten the scholarly attention it deserves, but this is changing even as I'm speaking to you. So here is what I have done to make sure this history stays honest and whole, not to mention ethical. Number one, I created a blog post area on my website for Colleen's writing. I restored the credit to the original author so her work is properly recognized. Number two, besides my website, I preserved her original blog posts in multiple places. The more places, the better, because if a website disappears or if some other site disappears, it's in more than one location. So I'll share how I did this and how this ties into the way that I collaborate with ChatGPT and other AI tools to restore this history for all of us. So I explained my dilemma to ChatGPT. It took a couple of prompts, but I'll summarize what I asked it to do. I said we have another example of a narrative where the authorship and attributions and provenance has been lost. Besides putting this information on my website and sharing it via the podcast, what else can I do to make sure this information is secured and proper attribution exists for now and for the future? ChatGPT gave some really good ideas. And one of the things to do is make sure that the information is cited and secured in multiple places and on multiple platforms. As I've been studying history intensely these last couple months, my awareness has even increased, and I want to do more than just the podcast in terms of creating multiple streams of documentation for the biographies of the people of the Eastland. The ongoing things that I run across are lack of source citations with the history and biographies, and also the lack of provenance for the photos. So the first solution that ChatGPT came up with was the Internet Archives Wayback Machine. Yes, I've been using that for a while, but not in this way. I often upload documents or videos that I find that might be of use for people doing this type of research. But ChatGPT informed me that you can also upload URLs for various web pages and websites. So what I did was take the URLs, and those would be the addresses for these various web pages of all of the various blog posts that Colleen Ringel created, anything from the Eastland Memorial Society to Colleen's own blog posts and upload them. So that's what I did. So Colleen's writing in its original format is now preserved. What the Wayback Machine does is take a snapshot of what the page looks like for that particular day that I captured it. And most importantly, most importantly, it date stamps it. That date stamp cannot be changed, and I'll tell you why that's important. Basically, it's tantamount to a screenshot, but with a little more oomph. So let's talk about practical application. Why would I go through all that trouble to save those URLs to the Wayback Machine? In theory, this could happen. Someone could come back to me, let's just say they've heard this podcast episode and they are one of the groups of people or people who has this unattributed article posted to their site, they can go behind the scenes and change it back to how it should have been. And they can insist that there never was a problem. This article always had proper attribution, proper provenance for the photos. But here's the thing: if you uploaded this particular URL from this other site that had the incorrect information, if you uploaded that to the Wayback Machine, it would date stamp it, it would timestamp it, and it would show us how that page looked on a particular day. Now here's a similar tool that I learned about from ChatGPT. And it suggested that I also upload all of these URLs to this site as well. The site is called by many things, but the site name the ChatGPT gave me was archive.today. It's the same type of idea as the Wayback Machine, but a different format. Honestly, it's more techie looking, but you can still create an archive there as well. So it's another way to safeguard this information. So I took Colleen's blog post URLs and uploaded them to Archive Today as well. So to hopefully future proof Colleen's article from any future borrowings without attribution, what I've done is, well, create this podcast. And I do copyright my podcasts, by the way, but they also are date stamped on BuzzSprout, which is what I use to distribute the podcasts. So there's that. So we've got the transcript, we've got the audio. And then what I did is upload her blog posts to the Wayback Machine as well as to Archive Today. In addition, I also uploaded the URLs of those sites that had what seems to be a semblance of the original article without attribution, just in case. So before we move along, I do have to say something that as you're working with these tools, be they grammar checkers or AI tools or whatever, remember you're the human. You are the one ultimately in charge. Don't just sit back and expect that any AI tool can quote unquote write it for you or do it for you. The reason for that is it can help you, but all of the AI tools that I have used, they can go off the rails pretty easily. And they do this thing called hallucinating, where they make up stuff. They seem to want to please you and make sure that you're happy with their results. And if they can't find something, they'll make it up for you. And this has happened to me a couple of times, particularly when I was first using AI, and I didn't know what its limitations and abilities were. So now it's always I'm the one who goes in there and checks stuff after it gives me some information. And the cool thing about now, I will ask it, what are your sources? Where are you getting this from? And a lot of times it will apologize and say, Oh, you're right. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that. No, this source doesn't even exist. You have to just be aware that it does those kinds of things. So it's like working with a really weird car, a weird old car that you know all of its quirks, but it can still get you to where you want to go. But just be aware of that, and that is how I use it. There's another type of tool or suite of tools that writers and authors use. These tools let you compare one version of a document against another. So although I was fairly certain that Colleen Ringel's article had been borrowed without attribution, it never hurts to do a reality check. So I asked ChatGPT if there were any new AI text comparison tools or AI authorship analysis tools. It gave me a few options, and the one I ended up using was called Diff Checker. No, they're not sponsoring this. Nobody sponsors this. This is my thing, okay? But I did use it. What I did was I took the original article authored by Colleen Ringel and I put it into the left side of the screen. This is a split screen. Then I took what appeared to be a copy of that article that was done much later and put it into the right side of the screen. I clicked evaluate and asked it to analyze them side by side. I'll share the highlights of what it came up with. The first thing, removal of archival information. The original text included details about its source. The Eastland Memorial Society website, authored by Colleen Ringel, archived via the Internet Archives Wayback Machine. This archival and source information has been completely removed in the modified version. 2. Conciseness in narratives. Many sentences and phrases from the original have been paraphrased or condensed. For example, the description of the neighborhood and its close-knit immigrant families is significantly shortened in the modified text. Number three. Revised cause of drowning. The original states, Ella drowned because she was pinned by one of the smokestacks or a column. But I cannot confirm that fact. The modified text rephrases this to Ella's relatives passed down the story that Ella drowned because she was pinned underwater by one of the smokestacks and couldn't breathe. But that fact was never confirmed. This adds nuance, but it does not identify who Ella's relatives were, which was the whole point of Colleen's original article. She was the relative. This was her family's oral history. And finally, this tool provided comparison statistics. It noted that there were 65 removals from the original article and 59 editions in this new article. The tool did not dispute that this newer article appeared to be based on the original article. As the checker explained it, the main change is a restructuring and significant condensation of the biographical information about Gabriela Ella Schlentz. Colleen Rengel's story is a case study in how authorship and provenance can disappear when it's borrowed and the attribution. Is removed. But there's always good news, and the good news here is that my public history academic work has provided the analytical lens to deconstruct exactly what happened. What deconstruction does is it gives you a methodology to expose the substitutions, omissions, and reframings that eventually can rewrite history itself. History is both strong and powerful and fragile, as we're seeing. And as long as I'm doing this work, I want to make sure that as much as possible I can restore the original voices of the people of the Eastland disaster. Before we go, I want to leave you with a few recommendations. If you want to learn more about using AI in your genealogy or family history research, and I hope you do, here are some great starting points. First of all, Denise Allen. That's D E N Y S E. Denise runs a Substack and YouTube channel called Chronicle Makers. She is brilliant at explaining AI to both beginners and seasoned researchers. And she constantly finds creative ways to reimagine family history through these tools. Next is Lisa Louise Cook of Genealogy Gems. I'm guessing most of you already know Lisa. She's been a major voice in the genealogy world for such a long time. And recently, she's been teaching how to use AI effectively and responsibly in family history work. Both Denise and Lisa are balanced about it. They highlight the possibilities and the pitfalls, which is exactly what we need right now. And finally, there's a newer podcast that I've been enjoying called The Family History AI Show, hosted by Mark Thompson and Steve Little. It's timely, informative, and focused not just on how they use AI, but also on the broader developments shaping the technology. These three resources will give you a solid foundation, different voices, different approaches, but all committed to helping family historians use artificial intelligence tools thoughtfully and creatively. There's more to learn from that older, now defunct site, Eastland Memorial Society, and I hope you will enjoy exploring it with me. I hope you have a good week, and I hope you take care of yourselves and take care of each other. I will talk to you next week. 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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