Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

The Search Goes On — Coincidence. Clarity. Resolve.

• Natalie Zett • Season 4 • Episode 147

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A single number can shape how we remember—until new evidence asks us to look again. This episode takes you inside another year of research on the people of the Eastland disaster, where a repeated death toll gives way to an evolving, documented estimate. I share how two overlooked victims surfaced through archival work, and why adding their names is crucial for families, historians, and anyone who believes facts should lead the story—not follow it.

This journey isn't just archival; it's personal and communal. I discuss the engine of citizen genealogy—focused work that chases one question until it yields—and how my background in writing, investigation, and IT shaped a method built on verification and transparency. We also confront a core challenge: there's no widely adopted standard for who "counts" as having died in the Eastland disaster. That vacuum allowed an estimate to morph into a brand.

A breakthrough in a Czech-language archive unlocked more than text. I found an original 1916 publication featuring over 140 photos of Czech victims—images largely unseen for generations. Uploading those photos to the Eastland Disaster Victims' Memorial on Find a Grave means family members can finally see the faces behind the names. One descendant left a memorial tribute, yearning for a picture that seemed lost forever. Sharing that photo reminded me why I do this work: a corrected record is not an abstraction; it's relief, recognition, and sometimes joy.

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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 147 of Flower in the River. Technically, this episode is the last one of 2025. However, it will be released on the first day of 2026, so it's sort of an in-between. But it's also a retrospective on some of the significant things that happened in this podcast in 2025, and there were a few significant things. So let's get to it.com, ran her interview with me. So Krista Cowen's podcast is called Stories That Live in Us, and I will put a link to our episode in the show notes for you. And that interview came about because in late 2024, I answered a question that Krista posed to her followers on Instagram. She asked people if they'd ever encountered coincidences during their genealogical research. And I thought, Krista, how much time do you have here? I responded right away and shared some highlights about the various serendipities and coincidences that started way back before I realized what was going on. Once I started researching my Chicago family, which I grew up knowing nothing about, that was where the research became unlike any other research I'd ever done in my life. It got weird, but in the best possible way, I was having all of these serendipitous discoveries, convergences. It is challenging to try to explain all this, but I did describe a lot of these occurrences that fit under the umbrella of supernatural in my book, and they certainly actually did happen in real life as well. But the issue is who's going to believe you? A lot of people, it turns out, but I didn't know that at the time. But there were too many things that were happening to brush it off as just one of those things. But that was not the end of it. In a sense, that was the preparation for what was about to happen. Once I started researching the people beyond my family, the other people of the Eastland disaster, beginning in November of 2023, the coincidences just escalated and it continues to escalate. I keep finding people and stories that seem to have evaded most researchers for over 100 years. And I often wonder why is that? But it's not just me, there are definitely other people and other groups doing this type of work, and they all fall under the category of citizen genealogists, citizen historians, and there's a temptation to dismiss those of us who do this type of work as amateurs, but while many of us may be lacking the credentials, we do deliver the goods a lot of the times. In a recent article in The Guardian UK, you can read about this very thing. The article is entitled The Hidden Engine Room, How Amateur Historians Are Powering Genealogical Research. And the subtext is Wealth of Datasets Compiled as Private Passions are now a gold mine for those hunting for their ancestors. It's not a long article, but it talks about people who take up a so-called passion project and turn it into something substantial, such as what I've done here, such as what so many people have done across the globe. And a lot of times, because it is our singular focus, we can end up doing a much more thorough job than established organizations simply if they're a large museum, they don't have the time to focus on one area exclusively, but we do. So check out that article if you get a chance. Once we lock onto something, a problem or a question or whatever, we don't let it go until it's solved. I can't prove that, but that's what I have seen with the people I work with, and certainly that's what I see in myself. And for those of us doing this type of work, there's one more thing we bring to our research. We might not always be thinking about this either, but we bring our own heritage and our own cultural background to the work. And let me tell you a little bit about my background, which is fairly complicated, by the way. I was very lucky to grow up around so many of my Eastern European immigrant relatives for whom there was deep respect for, but a healthy fear of the departed. They communicated with the dead regularly, and to them that was just a normal thing. And thus I treated it that way as well. This is my dad's side of the family. When I look back at them, I realized that they had a different type of listening. They did not dismiss those who had gone on before them. And I would say that I've inherited, if not that ability to communicate with the dead, I inherited the deep respect for the departed. During that interview with Krista Cowan, she asked what I call the million dollar question. She asked how many people died on the Eastland. And for the very first time before a very large audience, I mean Krista's got a following unlike anything, I shared my conclusions. By the time I talked with Krista, I had been doing this deep research of the people of the Eastland disaster for over a year. So not only did I know I could answer Krista's question with confidence, I had the evidence behind it. And I stated that, as far as I can tell, there is no source-sided, peer-reviewed list of Eastland fatalities. And that was before I rediscovered George Hilton's list, which was in his appendix D of his book Eastland Legacy of the Titanic. But Hilton himself was always clear that this was an estimate, and he wanted people to continue the research. And I shared with Krista that I thought the most responsible response to that question was to say I don't know, because I don't. Nobody does, by the way. Or if you quote a number, make sure to qualify it by saying this is an estimate. That is the most ethical thing to say when it comes to situations like this where there's a mass tragedy where it happened over 100 years ago. Hilton intended for people to continue the research. In fact, he encouraged it. And a few years after 1995, when he published his book, Hilton began working with the folks at the Eastland Memorial Society. This group sadly no longer exists. They've been disbanded, but for a while they continued his research and they posted a list of his findings in table format on their website. They were completely transparent. And by the way, that is the list that I've used, of course, with full attribution on my website. So I'm continuing that tradition as well. And later in 2025, I added two individuals to the Eastland Disaster Fatality List. In October 2025, I found Thomas Marin, who was inadvertently omitted from Hilton's original research. It was just the type of oversight that happens all the time when it comes to genealogy or history, and I have the feeling that had the research continued, someone would have found Thomas Marin sooner than 2025. So the addition of Thomas increases the estimate that George Hilton originally came up with, and that brought it to 845. And I released that information without fanfare, but I made sure that it was published everywhere I could publish something. And I also shared the information with various genealogists, historians, and professors that I am in regular contact with, so they are aware of this finding as well. All of these safeguards will ensure that this finding does not get lost or buried because it disrupts the accepted, repeated, incorrect number. But no matter I have the evidence. Later, in 2025, I revisited a story that I had covered briefly much earlier when I was new to this. Back then, it caught me off guard and I wasn't sure what to do with it. Well, time passed, I learned a bit more, and now I knew what to do with this. So I shared the story of Chrissy McNeilitzin, a woman who died seven years after being in the water. After the Eastland capsized. And the members of Chrissy's family who contributed to the writing of her death notice said that Chrissy became ill right after she was rescued from being in the water after the Eastland capsized, and she never got better. Having just discovered Thomas Marin, the 845th victim of the Eastland disaster, that prompted me to take a look again at Chrissy McNeil Laritson. And this time I thought, of course, she belongs on that list. And that brought the number up to 846, but it is not final. And the research needs to continue. This is just another adjusted estimate. The other issue I brought up during my interview with Krista Cowan was this. There isn't a consistent way the deaths from the Eastland disaster are defined or counted. In other words, no scholarly research consortium or independent evidence-based research body has ever set an official standard for deciding who is counted as having died on the Eastland. That's a big part of the problem, and we need to look at that. Scholars, historians, academics who have been working in this field, those would be the types of people who could weigh in on this. After George Hilton passed away, after this original Eastland Memorial Society disbanded in the early 2000s, what appears to have happened is that the death toll estimate that Hilton came up with was repeated continually to the point where it became a brand, not an actual reliable statistic. But even before that, this particular number was repeated often and accepted. I mean, I believed it too. And then all it took was doing the in-depth research. And honestly, it was pretty easy to find those two additional people. And for sure I will continue doing this work because, well, I've seen the risks of commodifying a death toll number. What that did in effect was halt and slow down the research. And history in general is never done. The research needs to continue. But the good news is this the actual real history of the people of the Eastland disaster is in very good shape. I mean, look at all the information, all the stories I've been able to share with you during the last couple of years. All available online. Most of these stories have never been told before, but they're there just waiting to be discovered. As I do this work of recovering the histories of so many people involved in the Eastland disaster, I often feel that I'm navigating at least two worlds, maybe more. So I first and foremost approach this work as a researcher. I'm a published writer, have been that for many, many years. And in my corporate life, I have worked as an investigator and as an IT consultant and talk about having to wear different hats. I've done everything from design to testing to programming systems. And all of that training and all of that experience, it does factor into how I approach this work. For one thing, I see this podcast as a job, even though I don't get paid for it. I approach it the same way that I approached any paying job I've ever had. I show up, I do the work, and I hope the results keep getting better and better all the time. Because I want to do right by these people. It's very important to me. And then later I learned how to become a genealogist. And I still am learning how to become a genealogist. And just in the last year or so, I began taking public history classes through the University of London, and all of these things helped me do this work. So that's the family history researcher side of my approach. But I'm not just a researcher, I'm also a family member. And I'm very cognizant of what the Eastland disaster did to my family. We lost somebody, my 19-year-old great-aunt. And people often say, well, that happened such a long time ago. That can't possibly affect your family today. I disagree. I saw that trauma. I followed that trauma line all the way down to present time, actually. And at some point I'll have to devote an entire podcast to it because if you want to talk convoluted, this is convoluted. But for the most part, the difficulties that many members of my family on that side of the family had, I can attribute a lot of that to the death of my Aunt Martha on the Eastland. But right now we need to return to 2025. This is so new, and I am still reeling from this discovery. If you listen to episode 145, One Family, Two Losses, and a Voice that went on, I created this podcast episode as a result of tracing the steps of a Czech woman whose death notice was listed inside of all places, the American Lumberman, a trade journal published in Chicago during the early 20th century. In my quest to learn more about this woman, her name was Julia Kolar, I ended up going down all kinds of rabbit holes. Fortunately, though, I found a translation of a huge article called Catastrophe on the Chicago River, and I featured that in the previous episode of this podcast. And it had all this information about every Czech person who lost their life during the Eastland disaster. And unfortunately, a lot of that information did not seem to find its way into modern day retellings of the disaster. But wait, there's more to the story. I didn't want to have just an English translation. I was hellbent on finding the original publication. And since it was a Czech-based journal out of Chicago, I thought it would be easy to find. It was not, but I eventually located it on a digital archive based in Czechia, which is interesting. At any rate, not only was I able to see the original document, but the original Czech language publication had over 140 individual photos of all of these people who died during the Eastland disaster, who were members of the Czech community, obviously. The majority of these photos just Do not seem to have been published since their first appearance in this journal in nineteen sixteen. So in other words, they were at risk of being lost, probably for a very long time, if not forever, had I not located them. That's what's so staggering and sobering sometimes about doing this deeper work. What to do with all of those photos? Well, if you listened to the last episode, you know what I did, but I'll repeat it here just in case you didn't get a chance to hear it. I extracted the photos from the PDF and I knew where they needed to live. They needed to live on the Eastland Disaster Victims Virtual Cemetery, which is a subsite on the website Find a Grave. And this crowdsourced site has become indispensable when it comes to researching the fatalities of the Eastland disaster. There's no other site that can match it, by the way. So I took all of these photos from the original Czech language publication and started adding them to their profiles on Find a Grave. I added over 140. Well, this marks my first Find a Grave marathon. It took me over the course of three days to get all of these photos in the right locations. Not that I was working three days straight, although it felt like that, but because it's really intense, detailed work, and I do need to return to do some quality control to make sure I got everything right. I did it quickly because I knew time is of the essence. As I've written on my website, these people have waited long enough. For nearly all of them, the information is there, a lot of times the photos are there. They're in all kinds of locations online, but you do have to go looking for them. And my goal has been for all of this stray information, put it together and get it into one place where it is findable. And right now, find a grave is the place for all of that. And also I didn't want to procrastinate because I thought, what if someone is looking for their person? I have the information I wanted to get it out there on Find a Grave. Many of the profiles that I updated had no photos whatsoever. So for many of these people, this will be the first time they will be able to see a photo of the person that they're looking for. So as I was adding photos, there was one profile that was pretty sparse. They hardly had any information. And people on Find a Grave often leave memorial tributes. And for this profile, someone did add a memorial tribute. The author of this memorial tribute wrote that this person was her great-grandmother. She knew her great-grandmother had died on the eastland, but she had precious little information about her, and she had never seen her photo. She really hoped to see what her great-grandmother looked like. I can only hope that she will return to Find a Grave and to this big surprise. This was a gift to me as well because it reminded me why I do this work. I do it because I love it, but I also do it in the hope that a family member will locate it and maybe get some information, some closure, some joy from seeing a photo or finding information about their loved one. Thank you again, Krista, for being so generous and for asking the kind of questions that you asked that really helped bring greater attention to the people of the Eastland disaster. The other thing that happened is that I finally got to meet someone with whom I've been studying with, communicating with, learning from for low these 10 years. She is someone that most genealogists need no introduction to, and that would be Lisa Louise Cook. I was on her Genealogy Gems Premium podcast, which means that it's only accessible if you are a premium member of Genealogy Gems. But that said, the topic was every life matters, and I couldn't tell you what I talked about because I was so awestruck. I really was. It meant the world to me to thank this woman in person because her Genealogy Gems was the first genealogy podcast I ever heard. And she's kind of my foundational person for all of the work that I do now. She not only is a podcaster, she's an instructor, and she is technically one of the best people I've ever met. And having worked in IT for so many years, I don't say that type of thing unless I really mean it. Early on when I was learning how to do my own very complicated, very messy family history, I was taking one of my first classes with Lisa Louise Cook. And she really helped me out with guidance, with hints, etc. She provided personal hands-on care, in other words. And the thing that I remember the most from that was that she treated my family as if they were her family. I never forgot that. And it was so important for me to tell her that because that is how I approach the work I'm doing right at this moment. And it meant so much to thank her for helping me build the foundation, the very foundation that I'm using now. But needless to say, finally meeting Lisa Louise Cook really made my year. I'm so grateful to her, and yes, I continue to study with her because she's always several steps ahead of everybody else. So no doubt about it, collectively, 2025 was a difficult year, and that's why it's super important to recount the good moments in a year like this and remember the good people, past and present, who continue to guide our steps. And I also have a prediction for 2026, and we'll see if I'm as psychic as my ancestors. I repeat this a lot simply because, well, the information about the death toll needs to constantly be readjusted as new information is discovered. Another way to say it is the record needs to match up with what actually happened historically. As mentioned, I discovered an additional person who died on the Eastland, but whose record was overlooked in the initial count. Now the question is, will the places and people who have been pushing that number as a brand, will they change that? Will they ignore that? Wait and see. I have the feeling what will happen is that it will just slowly disappear. But we'll see. And I'm hoping that this discovery encourages people, responsible historians and researchers and genealogists and students. I hope it encourages you to take a second look at everything you've heard about this or any other historical event. And you better believe I'll keep talking about this until that information is corrected. I mean, it's also about my family, and it's also about a lot of families who deserve to have their history treated with respect. Next week we will return to the Czech language article, Catastrophe on the Chicago River. It not only is compelling, memorable, it provides new information about what happened on that day. So, happy 2026 to you all. Thank you for joining me on this journey, and I will talk to you next week. And take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Goodbye for now. 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.flowerintheriver.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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