Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

The Return of the Omitted: History Strikes Back!

• Natalie Zett • Season 4 • Episode 160

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History sometimes fades not from lack of evidence, but because the path connecting the pieces is broken. The Eastland disaster records are overflowing with accessible online material, yet large parts of this story have drifted out of modern retellings. I’ll share a research discovery that changed my entire plan for this week.

I’ll take you inside the system I improvised to untangle the patterns that kept repeating before my eyes. Together, we’ll confront the problem of “thin” profiles that reduce real lives to mere names, and the Franken-article phenomenon, where pieces of biographical details are stitched together without verifiable sources. I’ll show how citations are not just technicalities, but the lifeblood of trust in history and genealogy. When citations vanish, so do the original voices behind every record, making it nearly impossible to advance the research. Then there’s the photo problem: images of Eastland victims and survivors circulate without credit, breeding mislabels and confusion.
Then comes the most startling revelation: the people left out. By digging through sources like Chronicling America, FamilySearch, Google Books, and HathiTrust, so far, I have uncovered 158 witnesses, survivors, victims, journalists, photographers, and others who appear in original accounts but are missing from online platforms.
This discovery raises a thorny question: how do we count the victims of major disasters—especially when the event took place over 100 years ago? At the very least, it should be a multidisciplinary conversation that includes historians specializing in labor, immigration, and maritime history, credentialed genealogists who know how to follow an evidentiary trail, and medical historians who understand trauma and delayed mortality.  This responsibility should not rest with a single individual or organization.  To illustrate this, I end with the story of Hancock Harmon, a first responder whose bravery was once celebrated, whose later illness was tied to the disaster, and whose name faded from history—until now.

If you are interested in Chicago history, storytelling, and genealogy, tune in to this episode. 

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Welcome And A Sudden Discovery

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 160 of Flower in the River Podcast. And I hope you're doing okay. So, on the way to writing the script for this week's podcast, I made a discovery that changed its entire direction, and I'll tell you about that. I want to open with a bit of shop talk only because I enjoy talking about it, but I am delighted that you also are interested in this. I want to start today by discussing a system that I more or less had to make up on the fly, but it was in response to some of the more academic writing that I've been doing for a while now. When I began researching, I ran into something, actually a lot of something, that I hadn't expected. I was led to believe, and I wish I would have questioned this sooner, that there was very little information available about the history of the people of the Eastland disaster. And if it was there, it would cost a lot of money to access. Well, as you may know, there's so much freely available, freely accessible information there that I can barely keep up with it. And acquiring the information, all you need is an internet connection and know how to conduct a basic search. That's pretty much it. That's the secret sauce. The sources were and are available all over the internet on all types of digital platforms. What I did find instead, though, was a big disconnect that I kept trying to understand, and I kept turning it over in my mind. The research started off really strong, beginning with George Hilton's book, Eastland Legacy of the Titanic, in 1995, and then he later partnered with the folks at the Eastland Memorial Society, which disbanded in the early 2000s. That rigorous research, which provided an incredible foundation, was not continued in the same way. And the work of compiling and organizing the names and their biographical details and putting it into a format that's both findable and accessible, that seemed to slow down as well. The weird thing is that there's absolutely nothing wrong with the documented history of the Eastland disaster. There's so much information available online that it is kind of overwhelming, but I've been doing my best to keep up with it, and I can only imagine what is also available in physical records. So as I began to map what happened to this history, the terrain turned out to be way different than what I thought it would be. I had to map it differently and decided to create some high-level categories that are subject to change, of course. And these categories are based on the patterns that I have seen that repeat over and over again. Category one. I mean, it's 111 years ago at this point. And yet, when I began to do this research, I found approximately 87% of the people had no biographical information other than name, sometimes ethnicity, sometimes marital status, and if they died on the Eastland, the cemetery where they were buried, but that was it. And besides that, there was no indication where this information came from. That's category one. Category two is a biography-like text, a Franken article, as I have been calling this, with no source citations or no verifiable source citations. Why are source citations so important? And conversely, why is their absence such a big red flag? First of all, it's about trust. If I share some historical information with you, I want you to know where I got it from. I don't want to tell you something that's been repeated over and over until it's stuck, but something that's documented, something you can point to. And also, it keeps the door open. Good history, good genealogy is not a dead end, it's a trail. And with proper citations, anyone can go back, check the original records, and keep the research going and correct things. And a source citation protects the original voices. Every article, every account, every record was created by a real human being at one point. And when these citations disappear, those human beings disappear as well. And sometimes someone else steps in and takes the credit. Source citations are required across disciplines, including historical, legal, genealogical. You get the picture, right? This isn't about footnotes for footnotes' sake or formatting for formatting's sake. No citation, no trails. And when the trail disappears, the history starts to drift. But you can get it back on track. When it comes to locating text with no source citations or text with unverifiable sources, I have found it to be possible. It's not easy, but it definitely is possible. It does add a lot more time to one's research. And as a researcher myself, my goal is always to make it easier for the next person. But not everybody does that. Let's talk about photos. Now I have seen many, many profiles of Eastland disaster victims and survivors on the internet, and a lot of them have photos attached. Sometimes they'll tell you where the photo came from, which family donated it, the date, where the photo was taken, etc. But most of the time, they will not. And finding the original photo, the original source is, to put it charitably, a friggin' nightmare. I've shared in previous episodes that I've taken some of these photographs that have no name, no date, no context, nothing, and dropped them into Google Images, Tin Eye, and every similar tool I could find. Once in a while, one of them will actually locate the original. But most of the time I get one of three results. Nothing, the same photo with a different name attached to it, or a completely different photo with a different name attached to it. Not only have I not solved the problem, I now have more wrong people to sort through. So the best luck I've had is going to family search or ancestry because if a photo is legitimate, that's usually where it originated. Someone in the family posted it. But if it shows up on some random Eastland-related webpage with zero attribution, that doesn't just fail to help. It actively causes confusion, misrepresentation, and frankly, a big old headache every single time. Now on to our next category. These are people associated one way or the other with the Eastland disaster, but whose lives and stories were omitted or excluded from any of the modern retellings. Indeed, oftentimes, the only time their association with the Eastland was shared was in a newspaper article. But they've been relatively easy to find online, so it is another one of those mysteries as to why so many of these people are not included in any modern retellings of the Eastland disaster story. This is the category I was not looking for. It found me just through doing basic, high-level research. How I was able to find all of these people, well, it was relatively easy. I would go to sites like Chronicling America, FamilySearch.org, Google Books, Hatha Trust, etc., and I would find newspaper articles, for example, that contained stories of survivors, eyewitness accounts, etc. But their names and their stories did not appear anywhere else on the internet. In other words, I could not find them in any platform that had anything to do with the Eastland disaster. That floored me. And that was one of those indicators that pointed to the fact that the research seemed to have stopped. I'll tell you about these missing people, or maybe I should call them the omitted people. I have already covered their stories in previous episodes, but I frequently revisit their stories because I find new information. Now, lately, I've been doing all of this statistical analysis and reviewing the work I've completed to date, and a question started nagging at me. I wondered just how many people have I located who have been excluded from the greater story of the Eastland disaster. The first time I counted, I came up with 60 people, 6-0, who had been part of the Eastland disaster, but whose names and stories have been left out of the modern retellings. But that was a while ago, so I thought maybe by now it's close to 100. That would be something, wouldn't it? I was not even close. As of this morning, and ironically, it's April 1st as I'm making this recording. This is not an April Fool's Day joke, though. While I haven't finished counting everyone yet because it takes time to go through each transcript, so far I have calculated that I have shared with you the biographies of 158 people who were associated with the Eastland disaster. So that's 158 people whose names and whose stories were told once upon a time, among them were witnesses, survivors, victims, journalists, photographers, and authors and poets. And I need to reiterate that since not one of these people appears on any list or on any online platform that features the Eastland disaster, they are in a very real sense the most vulnerable at being forgotten. Their names, their stories slipping away, if not forever, then for a very long time. The weight of how many people were simply left out of this narrative is kind of mind-boggling. But it is equally overwhelming in the best possible way, at least I keep telling myself that, to realize what one determined and rather stubborn person can do when they put their mind to something. So I hope that encourages you. Apparently, for the moment that person is me, but I will try to leave everything in good shape for the next person who comes along. So, what is the unevenness or the disconnect all about? I don't know. The only thing that I do know is how to locate the information and make sure that there's a record of each one of these people. What I've seen in the early to mid-21st century is that somehow the history of the people of the Eastland disaster drifted away from research. And then there is the issue of how the death toll has been handled in the last 20 years or so. As time passed, George Hilton's death toll estimate from his book Eastland, Legacy of the Titanic, was treated as if it were final or carved in stone, even though it wasn't. And that seemed to discourage further questioning and exploration. And that was counter to George Hilton's wishes. In fact, he encouraged people to continue the research and to see what we could find. One of the most important things to keep in mind is that whether you're dealing with history or genealogy or research in general, additional research is always needed. Research never stops. It has to continue. I have additional insight on this topic because I'm from Johnstown, Pennsylvania. I have insights into mass casualties that probably most people might not have. When you're dealing with a death toll in a mass casualty event, it's very difficult to arrive at an exact number. In fact, it's almost impossible. Now, having spent my early years in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, I certainly heard stories about the 1889 flood. And the one thing that I always remembered was how much the reported death toll varied depending on who you talk to. The fact is, bodies were still being recovered months after the disaster. So the death toll numbers continued to change. And all of that points to a larger truth. In chaotic events like the Johnstown flood or the Eastland disaster, where so many people are involved, the most responsible way to answer the question of how many died is to avoid false precision. In the case of Johnstown, it's more accurate to say over 2,200 people died. As for the Eastland, the responsible phrasing is that over 800 people lost their lives. This kind of language leaves room for continued research and future discoveries rather than closing the door on them. And I'll tell you about a few of them in a bit. Turning a death toll into a marketing venture damages the perception of the history, not the history itself, but the perception of the history. And I suspect that as more people get involved with this research, we will find even more people whose deaths could be attributed to the Eastland disaster. Last year I shared the discovery of an additional victim of the Eastland disaster, Thomas Marin, whose name was simply omitted or overlooked when George Hilton did his original research. Had he included Thomas Marin, his death toll estimate would have been at that point 845, not the 844 that keeps getting repeated. And I'll give you the links to those episodes if you haven't heard them, but that's a bona fide omission that happened. Now that brings up another issue. Maybe we can call it an adjacent issue. Who gets to decide who died on or of the Eastland? It should be a multidisciplinary conversation. It should include historians who specialize in labor history, immigration, or maritime history, credentialed genealogists who know how to follow an evidentiary trail, medical historians who understand trauma and delayed mortality, archivists from places like the Chicago History Museum or the Illinois State Archives or the Newberry and so on, and absolutely the descendant families who are sitting on private records and oral histories that never made it into any official account. And the ethnic historical societies because so many of the victims were from various immigrant communities who had their own record keeping traditions that have largely been ignored. The one thing it should not be is a single individual or a single organization acting as a gatekeeper. What we need is a group with open methodology, cited sources, and the humility to say we don't know yet, because that's what honest history actually looks like. This should be an ongoing topic for discussion and research. Now I'd like to introduce or reintroduce Chrissy McNeil Loritzen. I discovered the story in several newspaper articles. Chrissy was in the water after the Eastland capsized. She became ill and then she died seven years later. According to her family, Chrissy became ill after her rescue and never recovered. Chrissy was one of those people who died not on the Eastland, but of the Eastland. I covered her story previously as well. However, even as an Eastland survivor, she is not included in any online platform, except for my podcast. Is she a victim of the Eastland disaster? Well, I'm not a gatekeeper either, but I would say, based on what her family shared, that she should be considered as one of those people who would have ended up in In the category delayed mortality. But regardless, she was a survivor, so why her name is omitted, I don't know. And now there is one more person, the third person who was a victim of the Eastland disaster. I did share his bio briefly, but what I was waiting for was additional information about him, and I just found it. His name was Hancock F. Harmon. Well, he also went by other names too, which made him a bit of a challenge to find. But Hancock Harmon was a first responder. His heroism was reported in several newspaper accounts. But as with the other folks that I mentioned, his name and biography too were omitted from the modern Eastland disaster retellings. Hancock died a couple of years after the Eastland disaster. And similar to Chrissy McNeil LaRitson, he became ill after being in the water and never recovered. This is from the Jacksonville Daily Journal, that's Jacksonville, Illinois, by the way. Tuesday morning, october second, nineteen seventeen. Headline Hancock J. Harmon dies at Asheville, North Carolina. The end came at Southern Hospital after long illness. Deceased, many years an employee of Western Electric Company, suffered nervous breakdown after Eastland disaster. Hancock J. Harmon, son of Mrs. Catherine Harmon of 516 East College Avenue, died at Asheville, North Carolina at 9 o'clock Monday morning, according to a telegram received here Monday afternoon. Death came to Mr. Harmon after an illness extending over a period of several years, which was caused by a nervous breakdown following the Eastland disaster in Chicago. Mr. Harmon was in the employ of the Western Electric Company of Chicago for 20 years. For eight years, he was in the company's New York office, and for ten years was at the head of the accounting department in Chicago. At the time of the Eastland disaster when so many employees of the company lost their lives, Mr. Harmon, being an expert swimmer, was in the water nearly all day assisting in the recovery of bodies. A few weeks afterward, he collapsed and never regained his health. Hancock J. Harmon was the eldest son of Mrs. Catherine Harmon and was born at Piska, Illinois, March 21, 1878. He graduated from Brown's Business College after attending the public schools of the county. Since that time, he has resided away from Jacksonville, being, as stated before, in the employ of the Western Electric Company of Chicago and one of its most valued employees. Besides his mother, he is survived by four sisters Miss Grace Harmon of Chicago, Miss Anna Harmon of Chicago, Miss Ida Harmon, and Miss Rena Harmon of this city, also three brothers, R. E. Harmon of this city, Captain W. T. Harmon of Camp Grant Rockford, and Earl Harmon of Santa Cruz, California. His father preceded him in death in March nineteen fifteen. And one sister, Mrs. John Gowerty, died in March nineteen ten. The remains will arrive in the city Wednesday. The time of the funeral will be announced later. I tried to make a family tree for Hancock Harmon, and right out of the gate I had my first challenge when I found his death certificate. This is from the North Carolina State Board of Health, the city of Asheville. Here is the name on his death certificate. John Joseph Harmon. This is what I love about genealogy. You're often faced with these types of things. It is indeed the same person. I've seen his name in other newspaper articles as Hancock Joseph Harmon. So our Mr. Harmon went by a number of different names during his lifetime. Not that unusual. But in this death certificate, he was known as John Joseph Harmon. That's probably his birth name. The birth date, March 21, 1878, matches up with all the other records that I found for him. He was 39 years, six months, and ten days old when he died. His occupation was an accountant, and that also fit his obituary. Name of father was Arthur Harmon. His dad was born in Ireland, and his mother's name was Catherine McCarthy, also born in Ireland. It also fits the records that I found. And the informant on the death certificate was his sister, Grace M. Harmon. Grace was living in Jacksonville, Illinois during that time. And I learned that Grace also had another connection to the Eastland disaster besides her brother, Hancock. His date of death is recorded as October 1, 1917. This death certificate was filed on October 17, 1917. Now get this, genealogist people. The cause of death was attributed to pulmonary tuberculosis, which very well might have been something that he contracted after he was in the water, and perhaps his immune system was compromised. The Chicago River at that point was extremely polluted, and there was an outbreak of all sorts of diseases among many of the people who were pulled from the river that day. This case definitely needs more research and more input, but it's interesting to note this. The other thing is that he had been at this particular hospital one year and seven months, and in the state one year and seven months, not sure why he was in North Carolina. Also, in his death certificate, there's a question where they ask, where was disease contracted? And the response is Chicago, Illinois. So they're very consistent in where they think he first became ill. I have this theory from doing intense genealogy work for the last 11 or 12 years that if you're doing genealogy right, you end up with more questions than answers because one door literally can open ten doors. And that's the case with Hancock Harmon's biography. But there's more information about him and his family. By 1910, he was working for Western Electric in Manhattan, New York. And he was living as a lodger in a boarding house with other young unmarried men. That's what a lot of unmarried young people did at that point. They lived in various residences specifically for men or women. Somewhere between 1910 and 1915, Hancock returned to Chicago and was working for the Western Electric Offices in Cicero. I decided to take a look at Hancock's siblings because I was running into some brick walls with his biography. The first person I looked at was his sister, and I found out that Grace, who was the informant on his death certificate, in 1930, she was also living in Chicago in a woman's residence. It was called the Casa Maria Club. She was a school teacher. She taught high school at Lane Tech. Lane Tech lost a number of its former students during the Eastland disaster. And I did an episode on that as well. So the intersections of these lives are always something worth noting, with the common denominator being the Eastland Disaster. Well, my next steps are completing the family tree that I started for the Harmon family and posting that profile on familysearch.org. My hope is that a family member is searching and they find this. Specifically, that they find out that they had a relative who was not only a hero of the Eastland disaster, but who paid the ultimate price for what he did that morning. That Hancock Harmon's name, his biography, and his contribution to the story of the Eastland have appeared nowhere beyond a handful of newspaper clippings from 1917 is a mystery to me, but it's also part of a much larger pattern that I have seen during the last three years. So many people left out. Hancock is one of more than 150 people I have now documented who were omitted from the modern retellings of this story. As for Hancock Harmon, I'm very grateful that I found you. It is an honor to restore your story to the larger story of the people of the Eastland disaster. You were there, you acted, it cost you everything, and you deserve to be remembered by name. To Hancock and to all of them, we'll keep going. There are a lot more stories, and we'll get some more to you next week. In the meantime, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and stay safe. 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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