Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

The Clue in the Old Almanac: Solving an Eastland Mystery

• Natalie Zett • Season 4 • Episode 170

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This week, we return to Edith Franklin Wyatt’s July 26, 1915 article, Hawthorne, A City of Sorrow: Community Hushed by Death. Wyatt interviewed families and clergy whose lives had been touched by the Eastland Disaster, yet many of those individuals—and Wyatt herself—have been largely forgotten in 21st-century versions of the story.

This time, we meet the only Lutheran pastor Wyatt interviewed. She identified him as “the German Lutheran pastor Dr. Miles.” Sounds straightforward enough, right? Not exactly. Tracking down “Dr. Miles” and his church turned into a historical scavenger hunt that was far more difficult than I ever expected.  But I love a good scavenger hunt! 

Tenacity pays off — I found the key to unlocking the mystery. It’s one that I guarantee most have never heard of: the Lutheran World Almanac.  Though it sounds as if it's right out of Lake Wobegon, it really was a thing.

With that clue, “Miles” becomes Reverend Louis J.C. Millies of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Cicero, and newspaper records from the Chicago Daily Tribune and later local coverage help rebuild his biography and his congregation’s connection to the Eastland disaster. 

Along the way, I take a brief detour and share how working with coincidence, serendipity, synchronicity, and intuition, and honing mad research skills can be a winning combination when trying to restore long-lost history. As Martin Luther once said, “This is most certainly true!” 

If Chicago history, the Eastland disaster of 1915, and practical genealogy strategies for breaking through brick walls are your thing, this episode may be right up your alley.

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Welcome And Why Wyatt Matters

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. Well, hello, this is Natalie, and welcome to episode 170 of Flower in the River. And as always, I hope you're doing well. This week I'm going to finish discussing the article by Edith Franklin Wyatt. I have featured her article in the last two episodes because there's so much there. The article, Hawthorne, A City of Sorrow, Community Hushed by Death, was published two days after the Eastland disaster. Edith Wyatt was interviewing families as well as clergy persons shortly after the disaster. And it's important to mention that Edith Franklin Wyatt and many of the people who are mentioned in that article have been completely ignored in the 21st century retellings of the Eastland disaster history. And this article is pivotal and so important to our understanding of how this disaster affected the Hawthorne or Cicero community. We are going to discuss the final clergy person mentioned in Edith Wyatt's article. Last week I discussed the two Roman Catholic priests. This final clergy person is a Lutheran, and that story is going to lead me into a very brief discussion about how coincidence, serendipity, synchronicity, and intuition play in this type of work. Well, at least for me, they play. They play very well together, by the way. For me, the combination of using my research skills, using everything I've learned from so many other genealogists, as well as following hunches and jumping right into rabbit holes, even though people are strongly advised not to do that. I do it all the time. All of these approaches have led me to the evidence, to the stories, to the documentation that's been absent from the history of so many of the people who were a part of the Eastland disaster.

A Cemetery Find That Stunned Me

Natalie Zett

In late 2024, Krista Cowen, the barefoot genealogist, the corporate genealogist for Ancestry.com, put out a call on her Instagram asking if anyone had experiences with coincidence in terms of finding people in their family tree. So I responded to Krista's request. And I said, yes, I have. I wrote a whole book about it, but I made it fiction so I wouldn't get into the trap of having to explain the unexplainable. So Krista invited me to be a guest on her podcast, Stories That Live in Us. And during that time, I shared how I found the grave of my great aunt who was killed on the Eastland. In a nutshell, here is what I shared with Krista. I had never been to this cemetery until that moment. It was a Labor Day weekend in the United States, which meant the cemetery's offices were closed, no one was there, I had no idea how to find my family's graves in a massive, expansive cemetery that was a lot bigger than what I thought it was. I parked my car, went roaming around for about forty-five minutes. It was really hot and I felt like I was out of my mind. And then when I came back to the car to get some water, I leaned against the door. And for whatever reason, I didn't see at first that I had parked right in front of my great Aunt Martha's grave. Only it wasn't just my great Aunt Martha who was buried beneath this massive headstone. It was kind of a communal grave, I don't know what else to call it. So below Aunt Martha's name is her baby sister's name. This little girl died when she was three years old of diphtheria. And on the other side of their enormous stone are the names of their parents, my great grandparents. When my intellect and my emotions and everything else caught up to one another, I realized what I was standing in front of, who I was standing in front of. For one thing, my great aunt Martha, who was killed on the Eastland, a tragedy that I had never heard of. For another thing, two of the people who helped make me possible, my great grandparents. And third, a little baby, who died at the age of three of a disease that is preventable now. All of them were there, waiting for me. And my knees buckled. They did, and I collapsed, dropped to the ground, so I was on my knees on the ground in front of this enormous headstone that contained the bodies of family members that I never knew existed, at least until that point. Given the fact that I parked right in front of the headstone and missed it the first go round is still astonishing. But how I found it in the first place, I will probably never know. These many years later, that still blows my mind. And yet this little adventure certainly brought back my childhood memories full force. Growing up around so many Eastern European immigrant relatives, one of the things that was so unique about them, only I didn't realize it at the time, was their attitude toward the dead. Their attitude was this that the dead and the living coexist. But to hear the dead, you have to really pay attention. And sometimes they cause you to stop in your tracks or drop to your knees. This was a most unforgettable beginning. But at the time, I did not know that. I simply picked up steaks and relocated to the upper Midwest because it felt right.

Coexisting With The Dead

Natalie Zett

What I learned a bit later is that I wasn't being all that original. I thought I was, but I moved to an ancestral homeland without realizing it. And when I say ancestral homeland, I'm not kidding. As I learned later, I have deep ancestry in western Wisconsin, and that's just across the border from where I'm living now. And of course, I have deep ancestry in Minneapolis, St. Paul, as well as other parts of Minnesota. I had no idea. But something inside me recognized something very familiar because I moved here without thinking twice about it. And just to keep it from getting totally confusing, the relatives in western Wisconsin and in Minnesota are related to the other relatives in Chicago. So that's why this thread of connection just blows my mind when I think about it. And these memories, well, they brought me back to a book. It's called Psychic Roots, Serendipity and Intuition in Genealogy by Henry Z. Jones Jr., known as Hank Z. Jones. And I've quoted him many times, actually, we've written a few times. He not only is a preeminent genealogist himself, when Hank began having too many coincidences for them to be just a coincidence, he decided to do something very brave. He put out a call to the greater genealogy community asking other genealogists if they too had experiences with coincidence, synchronicities, serendipities, whatever you want to call it. And this was probably in the late 80s, early 90s, he had so many responses that he ended up writing two books about this topic. Largely these are these people's accounts with some commentary by Hank himself. For those of us who have had these types of engagements, we can and we do interpret these experiences in all sorts of ways, but I like the way that Hank expressed it best. He said these people, whether they are our ancestors or simply people who have departed that we're interested in, they are waiting to be found. And there's nothing that I've experienced in my research for the Eastland disaster that disabuses me of that statement, by the way. And other genealogists have written books about this topic as well, but Hanks are the most well known. It's not unusual, and I think as time passes, people will get more comfortable talking about their experiences as they work through their family trees. That big old buildup leads me to today's story. We are going to meet the final clergy person who was interviewed by Edith Franklin Wyatt for her article

Serendipity Books That Guided Research

Natalie Zett

about the Eastland disaster. So when I began this leg of the research journey, I thought this will be easy. Lutheran pastor, I know my way around all things Lutheran or a lot of things Lutheran, so it should be easy to get the information and create the biography to share with you. However, this was not the case. I'll tell you what happened and it's also a lesson in don't believe everything you read, especially with spellings of surnames. In last week's episode I shared the stories of two Catholic priests, and in this episode I will share the story of the lone Lutheran pastor. I won't reread the entire article, but I will just cut to the snippet where he is featured. Quote, what I hear said, said the German Lutheran pastor Dr. Miles, is this. Why did the government let this happen? This boat, they say, was discredited at other times and places. In that small snippet from Edith Wyatt's article, we actually got a lot of useful information, at least I thought so. But it didn't take long for this one to get challenging. Here's our first clue. This was a German Lutheran pastor. And considering the time period, he was probably the pastor of a predominantly German speaking congregation somewhere in Cicero. And of course we have his name, Dr. Miles, Reverend Dr. Miles, presumably. And although the name of the church was not given in the article, we had the name of the pastor, so this will be easy. Well, long story short, I could not locate a doctor Miles, a Reverend Miles. And although she didn't mention the name of the church in the article, I was able to locate a German Lutheran church in Cicero, Redeemer Lutheran Church. However, wouldn't you know it, in the articles that I was researching, they did not mention the name of a pastor that was even close to Miles. Since I love a challenge, I love the fact that this happened, and I thought, okay, I will find you somehow. I knew I would eventually find the correct information, but I wanted to have this ready for the podcast, so I thought, where else can this be? Tell me where you're hiding. And this isn't a straight up synchronicity story, like the ones that I was describing earlier. This is one of those that's hard to categorize, but it's part of memory. However, it's one of those memories that honestly I didn't even know I had. As I was ruminating on how to find the elusive Dr. Miles, I thought, okay, the name is probably misspelled. Either Edith got it wrong or the typesetter got it wrong. And I thought, how many

Hunting The Elusive Dr. Miles

Natalie Zett

ways can you spell Miles? Good lord. So I was racking my brain, and then a memory popped up or dislodged. I don't know. But this particular memory was from long, long ago and far, far away. This trip down memory lane took me back to the time when I was a very young teen. As a teen, I was very involved and very active in my Missouri Synod Lutheran church. I was there so much that I swear I was nearly a fixture. Our pastor was super nice to me, super nice to our whole family, and I loved to go and visit with him and ask him questions. Well, to kind of keep me off his back, he let me stay in the outer office, and that area had all of his books, so I would spend hours reading theological treatises, Martin Luther's works in English as well as in German. Not that I fully understood them, but I liked being around them. And I wondered why I never had friends my own age. Oh well. One of the books he had on his shelf was The Lutheran World Almanac. Honestly, in terms of memories, I didn't even think a piece of the Lutheran World Almanac was lodged in my brain, but apparently it was. You know what an almanac is, right? So basically an almanac's a reference book and it has all kinds of information, facts, statistics, astronomical data, tie tables and calendars for the upcoming year. Who wouldn't want to know that? At any rate, I'd forgotten about the Lutheran World Almanac, but I thought if there was one for that time period, I'm sure it had the information that I needed to crack this mystery wide open. So I went to my favorite place on earth, not Disney World, but Google Books, and I found a copy of the Lutheran World Almanac for 1922, and inside the almanac they had a list of all of the Lutheran pastors and all of the cities in which they were serving, including Cicero. For Cicero, there were three Lutheran pastors who were listed. We have W. P. Anderson, W. A. Kaiser, and the last one is L J C Milles. That's M-I-L-L-I-E-S. I think we found our guy. Actually he is our guy. And so this was a combination of memory, serendipity. I can't say it's coincidence, but the fact that that was lodged in my memory somewhere, and I probably would never have had any use for it. It moved to the front of the line when it was needed, so go figure. Anyway, we'll

The Lutheran Almanac Breakthrough

Natalie Zett

just chalk that up to another odd experience in the wacky world of genealogy. We'll continue learning more about Reverend Millie's. But solving this particular puzzle, well it got me to thinking. In a case like this one, I wondered what would happen if a similar researcher came along but they didn't have this type of Lutheran background. Would they be able to locate the Lutheran world almanac of 1922 by doing a basic search? I'm not sure, but I think the answer is no. Research skills absolutely are necessary to do this type of work, but sometimes I think we forget that we bring our own background and our own experience into the mix. That, along with a lot of coincidence and serendipity, make for some interesting outcomes. So anyway, in praise of almanacs, genealogists, historians, don't forget that almanacs can be tremendous resources. Now I want to introduce the Reverend

Reverend Louis J.C. Millies Revealed

Natalie Zett

Lewis or Ludwig Joachim Miles. He was born february eighth, eighteen seventy-seven in Chicago to German immigrants. At the time of the Eastland disaster, Reverend Millees was the pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Cicero. We'll learn more about that as well. Now here are some highlights from the life of Lewis Milleys. In 1901, Lewis married Anna Scharr at Zion Lutheran Church in Chicago. Now, since I had the correct spelling of his surname, I was able to locate another article about his involvement with the Eastland disaster. This article is from the Chicago Daily Tribune, Friday, July 30, 1915. And this piece is also a snippet from a much larger article. Services for a second group of four were held at the German Lutheran Church at 23rd Street and 50th Avenue. That, by the way, is Redeemer Lutheran Church. The Reverend Louis J.C. Millies delivered two sermons. Three were buried from the German church on Wednesday and one the day before. There will be no more funerals from this parish, the minister said. That's the end of that snippet, and that quote from Reverend Millie's. What's frustrating is that there's not a full length interview with him, but we have enough information. And like so many other people, he has been left out of the modern day retellings of the Eastland disaster story. But both he and his congregation were very much a part of it, and they were affected by it. So part of this work is ensuring that those who were a part of the Eastland disaster, their names, and their stories are included. And so this type of omission, this type of erasure does not happen. Again, I hope. six. This is from the Berwin Life and the date of this article is july twelfth, nineteen forty six. And that was thirty-one years after the Eastland disaster. Headline pictured above is the beautiful red brick building housing, the Redeemer Evangelical Lutheran Church, which occupies the southeast corner on 53rd Avenue and 23rd Street, constructed in 1924. The edifice, a combination church and school, was dedicated in April of the following year. The congregation which is 520 strong is served by Reverend Louis J. C. Millies and the Reverend Martin C. Lopaz Headline Redeemer Lutheran Church served by two pastors. Originating in a store in the year 1912, the Redeemer Evangelical Lutheran Church, which is now located on the corner of 53rd Avenue and 23rd Street grew so big that this year it was necessary to receive the services of a second pastor. Public services were conducted in May of that year in a store at 5113 Surmac Road. As still is the custom of the Lutherans, a Christian day school was established along with the church. Members of the Lutheran congregation were served

Redeemer Lutheran Church After Eastland

Natalie Zett

and the students were taught by a student. It wasn't until the following December that the Reverend Louis J.C. Millies of Elk Grove, Illinois accepted to take on the responsibilities of the resident pastor at the new church. In 1913 the congregation erected a building suitable for their place of worship and school at 23rd Street and 50th Avenue. Then in 1924 the Lutherans built the present beautiful structure on 53rd Avenue and 23rd Street This red brick edifice was dedicated in April 1925. When Reverend Millies had served as pastor and teacher for two years E. Yan was called in to help him out as teacher. Upon his resignation in 1919 Ed Harmon, present principal, was called to take charge. Still increasing in size it was necessary to obtain the services of Elizabeth Miller who was given charge of the primary grades at present Armin Grams is in charge of the lower grades. He came here last November German services are conducted regularly at this church at 930 a.m on Sundays English services are at 11 a.mastor Millies recently stated that there are approximately 520 members in the church and about 670 souls. Born in Chicago in 1877 Reverend Millies attended Zion Christian Day School and Concordia College. He was graduated in 1896 after which he took a three-year course in theology at Concordia Seminary. After serving in Nebraska for two years Pastor Millees accepted a call to Hegwish, Illinois where he served as both pastor and teacher for 10 years. His last church before coming to Cicero was in Elk Grove, Illinois. Married in 1901 to the former Anna Scharr, the pastor and Mrs. Milleys were blessed with three daughters and three sons. One of their sons died in 1921 The Reverend Martin Charles Lopaz, Reverend Mille's associate was born on March 15, 1918, also in Chicago. Grace Lutheran Parochial School, Concordia College and Concordia Seminary are the schools that he attended and was graduated from he received his BA and BD degrees from the seminary upon his graduation in June 1943. So that's a bit about the history of the church as well as some brief biographies of the pastors including Reverend Millies. Of course I want to point out that although the Eastland disaster certainly affected Redeemer Lutheran Church, it's not mentioned in this history later in 1946 in the Berwin Life newspaper we have an additional article headline Wishes for Reverend Milleys At the same time they're sending speedy recovery wishes to the Reverend Louis Millies Parish members, friends and relatives are hoping for his quick return to duties at the Redeemer Evangelical Lutheran Church. Reverend Millies, who is associate pastor at the church with Reverend Martin Lopaz, was rushed to McNeil Memorial Hospital by Cicero Police Ambulance last week this article is from the Chicago Tribune November 1346 The Reverend Louis J.C. Milleys 69 for 34 years pastor of Redeemer Evangelical Lutheran Church 23rd Street and 53rd Avenue Cicero died yesterday in his home at 2413 South 60th Court Cicero. The Reverend Mr Milleys formerly held pastorates at Gladstone, Nebraska and at Hegswish and Elk Grove, Illinois. He leaves his widow Anna, three daughters, Mrs. Eleanor Prusky, Mrs. Vera Repke, and Mrs. Helen Golterman, and two sons, Walter and Lewis Jr. Services will be held at Redeemer Church at 2 p.m on Saturday. Burial will be at Concordia Cemetery. In my research I found that only twice was Reverend Milley's association with the Eastland disaster mentioned. And the first time at least the first article that I located

Loose Ends And Closing Requests

Natalie Zett

the article by Edith Wyatt, Reverend Milley's name was incorrect. Locating his correct name was not straightforward, but applying research skills, a little bit of luck, and a lot of memory wrangling helped me find it. And having the right name unlocked more information about his life and his involvement with the Eastland disaster and his church's involvement with the Eastland disaster. I did a search on FamilySearch.org to try to find the records for the parishioners of Redeemer Lutheran Church who died on the Eastland, but so far I haven't been able to find them. I have one more place to reach out to and I hope that they can provide some information. Next week I will have more stories for you I promise you that. But in the meantime remember to take care of yourselves take care of each other and stay safe 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 wwwflowerintheriver.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

Head Shot

Natalie Zett

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