Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Fissures in the Archive: Behind the Curtain of the Eastland Disaster

• Natalie Zett • Season 4 • Episode 142

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Some histories don’t fracture because records vanished; they fracture because we stopped asking questions. In this episode, we look at the Eastland Disaster through a different lens — not just what happened in 1915, but how its story has been curated, simplified, and sometimes commercialized, and how we can repair and restore it with evidence.

I share what two years of deep research (and new academic work) revealed: there’s no agreed standard for who qualifies as an Eastland victim, and no peer-reviewed, source-cited list — even though a mid-1990s tally has often been treated as final.

We walk through four patterns shaping public understanding: “empty frames” where names exist without biographies; vanishing attribution that severs data from sources; forgotten lives hiding in plain sight across court files, newspapers, and community databases; and the numbers game that turned a best-guess death toll into marketing copy. 

Along the way, we spotlight crowdsourced heroes—Find a Grave volunteers, family historians, and independent sleuths—bloggers and podcasters—whose careful work often surpasses certain institutional sites, precisely because they cite, correct, and keep looking.

This is also a story about ethics and memory. We talk about why provenance matters, how to handle uncertain data without erasing it, and what it means to protect human stories from becoming slogans. From locating omitted individuals like Thomas Marren (excluded from the initial tally of victims) to resurfacing accounts tied to future Admiral Hyman Rickover, the method is consistent: follow the evidence, show your work, and leave a trail others can test. I also share progress on restoring the defunct Eastland Memorial Society website from the Wayback Machine, turning a lost archive into a living resource for researchers, descendants, and the simply curious. If you care about accurate history, communal stewardship, and honoring the people behind the numbers, this conversation offers tools and a path forward. 

Resources:

Palmer, Ada. Inventing the Renaissance: The Rise of Cultural Movements and the Myth of the Middle Ages. Princeton University Press, 2023.  Although focused on the Renaissance, Palmer’s exploration of how later generations reinterpret and reshape earlier eras offers a striking parallel to the historiography of the Eastland Disaster.

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 142 of Flower in the River Podcast. And I hope all is well with you. So this episode will be a little more on the academic side simply because I'm sharing with you certain aspects and information from the academic papers that I am writing about my discoveries regarding the history of the history of the Eastland disaster. In other words, the Eastland disaster's historiography. And for sure we will get back to the stories, but this is a good time to pause and to tell you what I have discovered. It's the first time I have collected the statistics, put them together, and started paying attention to the patterns. And I've hit the two-year mark on this research and podcast project, and there is something about the month of November. I don't know what it is. November seems to be when the revelations emerge, when major insights crystallize, and when some very significant people appear. Last November, 2024, Krista Cowan interviewed me for her podcast, Stories That Live in Us. This is still one of those pinch me moments that feels surreal. Everyone in genealogy knows Krista Cowen, and her generosity in sharing knowledge has influenced countless researchers. During our conversation about my book and my family and the Eastland disaster, Krista asked the million dollar question about the Eastland and the death toll. I told her what I had discovered after a year of intense research, and that was this. There are no established criteria for who qualifies as an Eastland victim, and there's no definitive list. Now later, I did find that George Hilton's book provided appendix D, a list of the people that he knew of at that point, and that would have been in the mid-1990s, and that would be the victims. But here's the thing. If you read his book and listen to him speak about these findings, he never intended that list, his research, to become set in stone or, god forbid, commercialized. Like all good researchers, he knew this wasn't the final word, and he wanted the research to continue. And since that interview with Krista, I do continue to find all kinds of information. And the most significant one in the last few months was a court record for a man named Thomas Marin, and I have shared that information on an earlier podcast. Thomas Marin was omitted from the total that Hilton calculated. It was just an oversight. However, Hilton's tally from his book is apparently the one that's been lifted and reworked into this so-called final death count, even though that was never George Hilton's intent. Furthermore, that number has even taken on a kind of promotional life of its own, if you want to call it that. But I don't want to get ahead of myself. We also need to go back to November 2023. That was after my book was published, and I initially created the podcast as a way to address questions that people had about the book. I was on a number of podcasts and radio shows at that point, and people had all kinds of questions. They asked me things that I had never thought about, so it was fun to discuss those on my podcast. After doing that for several months, I felt compelled, well, no, obsessed with this idea that I had to expand beyond my book and beyond my family's story to take a look at the broader community of lives that ended and were altered by this tragedy. As I've mentioned and will continue to mention, I did not want my family's story to become part of this echo chamber where only a handful of stories are retold. For one thing, when I saw the pattern, the same handful of families being highlighted over and over again as if they somehow were stand-ins for everyone else on the Eastland, that stopped me cold. I had a flashback. It took me all the way back to my massive city high school, where the yearbook made it appear that only the jocks and cheerleaders existed. The rest of us were kind of in the background and invisible. And I thought, oh no, not this again. I am not letting that high school dynamic repeat itself in the telling of the Eastland. Everyone whose life was ended or touched by the Eastland disaster, all of us and all of our people are important. At first glance, some Eastland related websites looked as if they offered a true one-stop shop, as if everything anyone might want to know about the ship, the disaster, and the people would be right there. And that's exactly how some of them presented themselves. Now, given how much time has passed and how much free information is now accessible online, that expectation felt completely reasonable. I thought this is going to be a slam dunk, really easy, right? So I began this leg of the research journey after I found a court record from 1934. It was filed on behalf of a number of victims, including two brothers, whose surnames I've seen in my own DNA matches on ancestry. This is just the beginning of the long and winding tale that I have to share with you. So they were of interest for a couple of reasons. I never heard of this court case, and also they appeared to be relatives. So Herman and William Ristow are the people responsible for me getting into the rabbit hole that I've never emerged from. So I started looking at these one-stop shopping websites that were supposedly taking care of the Eastland disaster. I was looking for biographies of the victims, these victims. And I was hoping to get additional information and wanted to do my own research to see if I could augment what was already there. And also, I wanted to get a better understanding of the world of Chicago during that point. It didn't seem as if I was asking for all that much, honestly. I mean, by 2023, 2024, that all would have been taken care of, or most of it. Yes, we have one of those here. That statement could just as easily describe how the Eastland's history has been presented. After two years of deep, intense, committed research and now taking advanced history courses and writing more scholarly articles about my discoveries, patterns have emerged, and the same patterns continue to emerge. Let me walk you through what I have found so far. Pattern one, the empty frames. Initially, when I searched online and looked at organizations that I thought would have had detailed biographies of the Eastland victims, what I found were mostly names and bare bones demographics. Yet, here's the other odd thing. At the same time, I started to find something else, something way more hopeful. I saw that many independent researchers had uncovered treasure troves of information. If you go to crowdsource places like Find a Grave, you'll see profiles of Eastland victims where volunteers have added photos and biographies for so many of these people. And as of November 2025, Find a Grave has more information about the victims of the Eastland disaster than any other website. That's what I said. And in the future, I'm sure that will change because change is the constant. But right now, when it comes to Eastland victims, go to Find a Grave if you want to find out more. So that's the first illusion that we need to dispel. It's not official sounding organizations that have been carrying and adding to the biographies of the victims of the Eastland disaster. It's crowdsourced places like Find a Grave that have been doing this. Now, are the citations always there? Are their findings accurate? Of course not. That's why it's crowdsourced. We can weigh in on that and all of us get a chance to provide new evidence and challenge what's there. That's part of the process. Find a grave has proven invaluable despite some of its drawbacks. When you do this type of work, this type of research, you have to think of yourself as a detective. You have to look at every possible source, every piece of evidence. And that's just what I did and just what I do. We will continue. So it's not just find a grave that I used for my resources. I started expanding my search to every possible site online that I could think of that might have something about the people of the Eastland disaster. Looking at places like Google Books, Hatha Trust, Family Search, Illinois Digital Archives, Chronicling America, that was where I found so many detailed biographies about the majority of the people associated with the Eastland disaster. And that is another head scratcher. I mean, the information is there, it's available online, it's free, it's accessible, and yet somehow in the middle of the 21st century, that information has become strangely disconnected from many, not all, but many of the various organizations and websites that were supposed to be curating the history of the Eastland disaster. This situation really does feel like nature abhors a vacuum. I think that's why the people on Find a Grave, by individual bloggers, and people like myself who report on this history each week stepped in and stepped up. We took the Eastland story into our own hands to keep it visible and alive instead of waiting for an institution to do it. Most of us have reached a consensus. We realize that that kind of institutional stewardship isn't coming anytime soon. Down the road, though I predict it will be because there are people already discussing this. But for the moment, that's the situation, and for the moment, this is what we are all doing. Pattern two, the case of the vanishing attribution. When I first began researching people of the Eastland disaster group, I looked in places where I thought I might find that information easily. And here's what happened a lot of the time. If I found a biography, much of the time the source citations and provenance for the photos were not there. In other words, no one knew where this information came from. I have to say it took me a while to wrap my mind around all that. I thought, am I seeing this? Why would any individual, group, etc., who claims to be stewarding the history of the Eastland disaster make that kind of decision? It wasn't just a red flag, it made no sense. The other thing, no matter which way you cut that, if you post something that you obviously are not the author of and you don't give attribution, that is plagiarism. That's the kind of lapse that undercuts credibility at the foundation. You have to tell people where you got the information from, plain and simple. So that situation, it's bleak if you're an organization and you want any kind of credibility. But in terms of creating an obstacle, it's an annoyance, but it's not an obstacle because while I could never quote anything from a place where they didn't provide source citation, I can still use those scraps of information as a starting place. And to date, everybody that I have searched for, I have been able to find either a story about them from a newspaper, genealogical information about them from places like Family Search, etc. There's not a person that I have not been able to locate. The biggest challenge is when the name gets messed up one way or the other. Just last week, I found an article that was an interview with a woman called Anna Minert Grimmer. And when I went to locate further information about her, I found absolutely nothing. So having done genealogy for 10 years, I know about the name switches that can happen. In the case of Anna Minert Grimmer, I was able to find her, but she was under a completely different birth name. Nothing that even had Anna in any of the names that she carried. So she was a challenge, but not impossible. But by stripping out authorship, by removing provenance, you create roadblocks for someone who's looking up biographical information about the individual that they're associated with on the Eastland disaster. Pattern three, the forgotten faces, the forgotten lives. Along the way, as I was researching the Eastland disaster, at this point, I have located over 60 people connected to the Eastland disaster who have been completely overlooked. In other words, they're not even on the radar. They're not included anywhere in any list that I could find. They were and they still are at the highest risk of being lost and excluded from the history of the Eastland disaster. And this is another head scratcher because these people are so easy to find. Type Eastland Disaster into a search box on one of these sites, such as Google Books, and you will get an avalanche of information, and it will take days to go through all of it. Again, there's so much information there online. There's so much untapped resources available at your fingertips if you're doing this type of research. Of all the research I've done so far, this continues to be the biggest shock because I had no idea there were so many people associated with the Eastland disaster who have been left out of its retellings. But there they were, hiding in plain sight. And the majority of my podcasts during the last two years have been about these people who've been excluded entirely. I didn't want them to get lost. Many you may not have heard of, but there's one that I bet you have heard of: Hyman Rickover. Yes, the future Admiral Rickover, father of the nuclear navy. Rickover was working as a Western Union messenger boy in Chicago when the Eastland capsized. He was 15 years old. Later in life, he was interviewed and he told his story about his experience with the Eastland disaster. I shared his story a few episodes ago. And as far as I can tell, that was only the second time his story had been shared. There are so many stories that were told once or twice, but for whatever reason never brought forward until now. And finally, pattern four, the numbers game. From july twenty fourth, nineteen fifteen until present time, all types of death toll numbers have been circulated in regard to the Eastland disaster. Here's the thing, the most responsible way to approach something like this, a disaster where mass casualties happened, is to say this is our best estimate. The operative word is estimate. But ongoing research has to be part of this. We know that new information will always be uncovered. I uncovered somebody who was missing from that initial list in October of 2025. Will that person be included in the so-called official list that's bandied about? I'm not holding my breath on that one. I've included him and I've added him to the list that I created, which is based on the work that George Hilton did. I'll make sure that he's taken care of there. But what appears to happen is this an unsubstantiated death toll number has been repeated over and over again. It's never been checked. And yet it has been accepted. Without substantiation. When you think about it, that is quite the feat. I mean, it's it's quite the case study, and I've discussed this with various historians, and here's what surprised me in their response. They weren't at all shocked that this had happened. What shocked them was the fact that it has been allowed to go on for so long. Yikes. The number has been used in all kinds of venues, including to promote merchandise. Yes, indeed. It's only been recently that I learned about one of these merchandising initiatives. A fellow Eastland Disaster family member shared something with me this last summer that I thought was just totally bad AI art. I mean, I've made a lot of bad AI art. I know what that looks like, but it was not that. It was actually a piece of merchandising with the unsubstantiated death toll number on it. Now, I respond to the Eastland disaster history in two ways. My response as a family member was similar to this other family member's response. And that would be, you've got to be kidding me. Stepping back though, my response as a researcher, though, is this there's probably not a lot we can do about that. So continue doing the good and faithful research. Continue repairing and recovering the history as best we can. And we do that by researching. We do that by recording what we've found, by citing the sources, and by telling people where we got this information. We share what we find, not what we wish we found. So, in other words, we create a lot of evidence, and I have created a lot of evidence by this point, that evidence generally steers the course correction, and for the Eastland disaster, we need a lot of course correction. Something that I shared with this fellow Eastland disaster family member is remember this. No one owns the history of the Eastland disaster. That too is an illusion. No one owns it. What is true though is that damage can be done to the perception of the Eastland disaster. However, no one can damage the actual history of the Eastland disaster. Bear with me on that. Why? Because the actual history of the Eastland disaster is a living thing. It happened, it's been well recorded, and there are those of us who wish to engage with it, with the people and with its history. The departed of the Eastland are not as far away as people think. The way my family, well my dad's family, and those are the people who were either Orthodox Christian or Byzantine Christian, they treated death and memory and these types of things in a very unique way. For them, memory is sacred. And they seemed to treat remembrance as an act of healing, not just for the dead, but for the living. They had a saying when somebody passed away, memory eternal. They would say it in the Rusin language. But it wasn't sentimentality. It was saying something like, Your life remains part of ours. You are not lost. And I can carry that over into the way that I treat the people of the Eastland disaster as well. I am part of that collective communal experience, whether I like it or not, I am. And I do, if not like it, I'm honored to be a part of it and honored to care for it. The Eastland Disaster is a historical event, but it's not just a historical event. It's a collective responsibility to remember, to tell the truth, to guard the stories, and to honor the dead. These people were not a statistic or a marketing opportunity. They were people. And I will keep saying that, and maybe by saying that over and over again, that will undo some of the damage that's been done to the perception of this history. But the Eastland disaster history is alive and well, and the souls of those people are fascinating and waiting to engage with all of us. Also, I don't think that the departed of the Eastland disaster would appreciate being turned into a merchandising opportunity. The biggest lesson for me, though, going forward is to question everything and demand proof of various statements and numbers that are bandied about. If that can't be provided, move along. In regards to history generally, and in regards to history of the Eastland disaster, there is not a single aspect of history that should be considered off limits or held hostage. We should have no gatekeepers. History should always be re-examined and approached with new eyes and new questions. We find out new information all the time. So what is the way forward? Well, when faced with this kind of challenge, there's always something that you can do about it. And even a type of healing that happens when you start seeking the truth about something, it's a tough thing to shake off those myths, those untruths, and those illusions because they cling like barnacles. But when you gather evidence, when you track down records, when you care about the people, when you love the people and you want to tell the stories as they happened, sharing these stories becomes a bridge between then and now. Speaking of Krista Cowen, her podcast is called Stories That Live in Us. And the Eastland Disaster is a story that lives inside of me. I just didn't know it until a little bit later in life. And when it was time for that story to not just live in me, but live in the world, I needed to do the best job possible. And when you tell a story, it lets history breathe. History's dynamic, changing. It's alive. Let it be what it is. Do not try to control it, and don't turn it into a branding opportunity. In the meantime, I'm going to spend my time trying to restore it. But also here's what's new this year. In the last couple of years, I have met so many people in so many different communities too, not just genealogical communities, and I love those folks, by the way. They are my number one support. But in places like IT communities too, I've met people who are so enthusiastic. There are people there who are aware of what's going on and they want to support my efforts by giving me advice and assistance. And as I've been going through my public history classes and coursework, I've shared these findings with my brand new colleagues and professors. And that community is now aware of what I uncovered, and because of their interests and passion for history, they are really glued to it. They want to know what I'm going to do next. And the other thing I've learned from working with historians is that many of them see all history connected. So if one aspect of history, such as the Eastland disaster, suffers, it can indeed affect all of history because it all, in a sense, is one. So what am I doing now? Well, obviously I'm podcasting, yes, and I'm sharing the podcast. It goes all over the world, and all of the artifacts that I create from this. Podcast, meaning the audio, the videos, etc., they too become part of the historical record of the Eastland disaster, and hopefully they'll make sure that it doesn't get lost again. And the other thing I'm undertaking at this point is restoring the now defunct Eastland Memorial Society website. I have shared bits and pieces of that website on my own website, but I thought, gosh, there's so much here. They did everything right in terms of documenting history, and they have history that I've not seen any place else, by the way. So what I decided to do was build a separate website, and it's coming along, it's kind of slow. But what an education this is. These pages are chock full of information, and it's taking me a while to do this because I'm always stopping to read everything. And I can't help but feel a little sad and wistful when I see what they did. If they had continued, I think most of this history would have been taken care of by now. That's how complete and thorough and professional, etc., etc., they were. Even with the late 1990s look that they have going on, I like that as well because it really points back to the fact that they applied elbow grease to make this work. And I will let you know when it is live. I'm working off the various pages that I'm finding on the Internet Archives Wayback Machine, and the pages are not presented contiguously. A lot of times you have to just go hunting and hoping that you find the next page. Even that is enjoyable for me. It reminds me of doing ancient studies, which I loved. So it'll take a while, but I think it's going to be worth it. And I also think it will be an invaluable research tool for people who are studying the Eastland disaster. So thank you for coming along with this more academic episode of Flower in the River. This won't happen very often, but I wanted you to know what I'm doing, what's informing that, and tell you about the challenges that I've run into. And because I've been doing this intensely for two years now, I can speak with a modicum of authority about what I am finding. But the first thing is you have to name the problem in order to deal with it. So thank you for being here, and next week I'll bring back some more stories for us. Take it easy, 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 1915. Goodbye for now.

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Natalie Zett

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