Stories That Live In Us

The Magic Part Is The Listening (with Natalie Zett) | Episode 45

• Crista Cowan | The Barefoot Genealogist • Season 1 • Episode 45

Share episode

When journalist Natalie Zett received a mysterious family manuscript, she had no idea it would lead her to her long-lost Aunt Martha – a 19-year-old victim of the tragic 1915 Eastland disaster in Chicago. What began as a deeply personal quest to understand her aunt's story transformed into a mission to preserve the forgotten stories of over 800 souls lost that day. Through a combination of journalistic expertise, genealogical research, and what she calls "listening to the departed," Natalie shares how she's uncovering the human stories that have been overshadowed by the famous shipwreck. Listen as we explore how family history research can bridge generations, heal old wounds, and sometimes give voice to those whose stories are waiting to be told.


Listen to Natalie’s podcast at:
FlowersInTheRiver.com

〰️ 🌳 🧬 〰️

🎧 Ready to discover more stories that could transform your family connections? Subscribe to 'Stories That Live In Us' wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review to help other families find their path to deeper connection through family history. Together, we're building a community of families committed to preserving and sharing the stories that matter most.

🖼️ Ready to turn your family discoveries into a beautiful conversation piece? Visit FamilyChartmasters.com to create a family tree chart that will help your family share stories for generations.

♥ Want more family history tips and inspiration? Follow me @CristaCowan on Instagram where I share behind-the-scenes looks at my own family discoveries and practical ways to uncover yours!

Natalie Zett:

They all deserve to have their stories told, whether they're the young Greek immigrant guy that just has a little obituary or whatever, or entire families, or the ones and twos that just kind of got lost. I thought, no, I will tell all your stories.

Crista Cowan:

Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future. I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist. I've spent my whole life discovering the power of family history, and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything. My guest today is a woman named Natalie Zett. Natalie is not a traditional genealogist. She has a master's degree in theology. She was in journalism as her career. She comes from not just a strong journalistic background educationally, but also in her family tree, and when she discovered an aunt who had died in a very unknown tragedy, she became obsessed with this particular tragedy, so much so that she started a podcast and written a book about all of the people that died on the Chicago River in this particular boat crash. And so today she's going to tell us a little bit about how she made the discovery of this tragedy and then what she's doing to make sure that the stories of those victims are told. I hope you'll enjoy my conversation with Natalie Zett. Well, tell me about you.

Natalie Zett:

I don't know that I'm that interesting, but some of the things that have happened to me are and this Eastland, the reason I reached out to you is because of the number of coincidences, which I can't even count anymore serendipities, synchronicities. I took a lot of Jungian psychology in undergrad, so that comes forth. But I'm somebody who was told when I was in elementary school that I didn't have a family history. Because I'll explain. It's actually comical, it's funny now. But we went to I'm from Johnstown, pennsylvania, and the family moved to Cleveland and we went to an inner-city Cleveland school. Most of the kids were like me, immigrants, children, grandchildren from Eastern Europe, southern Italy, and the rest of the kids were Black, from the South. And then there were some Jewish children whose parents or grandparents were Holocaust survivors, jewish children whose parents or grandparents were Holocaust survivors. The teacher told us and this is okay, abandon logic for a moment that we had to trace, we had to do a family tree and we had to trace our family back to the Mayflower. And oh, it gets better. And she told me that I wasn't a real American unless I could do that. A teacher told you that, what's interesting, krista is years later. Now she's joined the angels. Wherever she is now, I did her bio. She's from the same village in Slovakia, that's adjacent to the one where my grandfather, my paternal grandfather, came from, olsavica, and I thought, huh, you had a little self-acceptance trouble. But so I went home to my mother and she was so tired of getting called down to the school. She spent more time in that school than I did, actually talking to the teachers because I was always just asking questions. But I said, mom, am I not a real American? And she said oh, for God's sake, yes, you're a real American. I said, well, I have to do a family tree. And she said we can't because all of my parents, your daddy's parents, they came from Europe. All the records were burned in the war we don't know which war, we don't know where. We don't have a family history. And then there was that, and so I went back and I told the teacher and I guess we got away with that. But I thought, oh, I'm one of those people where somebody tells me something like that. It's like I don't think so, but I'm going to prove you wrong someday.

Natalie Zett:

Then, about the same time and my mother also got called down when I wrote a short story called the Mummy's Hand. I was in third grade and we could write a short story and the teacher was concerned because a little girl shouldn't be writing stories about a person using a manuscript to bring back somebody from the dead and I got in trouble for that. And my mother just said, oh, for God's sake, natalie, don't keep doing this stuff. And I said I don't understand. Why am I in trouble?

Natalie Zett:

This is what daddy's family does, my dad's family, very different from my mother's family. Most of them were still living in Johnstown, but they were from what is now Slovakia, but really their ancestry was mixed of. Them were still living in Johnstown, but they were from what is now Slovakia, but really their ancestry was mixed Romani, carpatho-rusyn, which is what my dad's dad was. Yeah, like Andy Warhol and a smattering of other things Ashkenazi Slovaks. We had the different religions, the different folk, magic things, and Christianity didn't come to those areas until much later. I don't know that, people know that. So it was a real infusion of different things, and Christianity didn't come to those areas until much later. I don't know that, people know that. So it was a real infusion of different things and so a lot of the way that my family made a living when they came to Johnstown was the things you might expect fortune telling horses, what else? Tinsmith, my dad was a musician and so things like that.

Natalie Zett:

So I didn't think anything about that. But my mom said you could get hurt. And I didn't know what she meant by that. But she just said just be careful when you talk about this stuff with whom you talk about that. But my dad had an over let's just say an overdramatic sister who said darling, don't worry about that. She said the living, the dead, we see them all. It's part of our heritage. But I did learn as I went on in life to maybe keep a lid on that stuff.

Natalie Zett:

But what happened was two things the power of a manuscript to bring something back to life and also the fact that when somebody tells you you don't have a family history, don't believe them. Right? So I shouldn't be a genealogist. I'm not the genealogist that you and so many are, but I'm pretty good at it. I figured out how to do it and that's how I've been able to unlock a lot of this Eastland disaster stuff. So mom's history was this, and this is what's significant for my Eastland involvement my mom's mother died when my mom was three and there was a lot of back and forth. At that point they were living in Johnstown but my grandmother this was her second marriage. She left Chicago in 1929 to marry my grandfather, her second marriage. The first guy was a goof, abusive and that sort of thing, and she had two older children.

Natalie Zett:

My grandmother was working for Western Electric during the time of the Eastland disaster and I'll explain what that was. Western Electric was probably like the Silicon Valley of its day. They did everything having to do with communications. My grandmother was a laborer, but what I learned later is that she left Chicago to escape heartbreak and guilt. So she was pregnant with her first little girl. She already had a child and she was supposed to go on this excursion across Lake Michigan. Every year Western Electric had a big, big excursion thing going for its employees. So all these I think about 7,000 people showed up at the docks down. If you know Chicago, between Clark and LaSalle, you can't fit in there now, but at that time it was just, you know, massive big deal. Everybody's all dressed up.

Natalie Zett:

It was a Saturday morning, july 24th 1915. And my grandma was feeling sick, so she gave her tickets to her little sister who was 19. And she said you go on at, martha, I don't feel well. So Martha and her girlfriend left. They were living in South Lawndale area known as Little Village now. They got on the streetcar, went down, got on, and the Eastland already had a troubled history of listing meaning it would go back and forth and back and forth. They had some close calls earlier and the thing rolled Within seven minutes. All these people were just plunged to one side, right near the dock too. That's what's so crazy. Some people were able to just walk away if they were up, you know, above, but a lot of the girls who were, all you know, dressed up and everything, they went down below because it was raining, they didn't want to get messed up and things like that. So my 19-year-old aunt was one of the casualties of this thing, and so that's where that started and my grandmother blamed herself.

Crista Cowan:

Were you raised knowing about your Aunt Martha at all Like did you even know she existed?

Natalie Zett:

I would not have known the little baby that my grandmother was pregnant with. She was born, grew up in Chicago and she became a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and a few other things, and I was not close to my mother's family. I mean, I love my dad's family, but with very good reasons. What I knew of my mother's family my grandfather, her dad and his family I love my granddad, but the rest of them ugh, and I didn't want to know anything about them. So I didn't know about. I knew I had a grandmother. I knew I had an aunt that was killed on a ferry boat accident. But no, it was 1997. My Aunt, pearl, the oldest the little baby, is now in her 80s and she decided she needed to write this family history. No one cared about it and she was talking to my mother and she said give it to Natalie.

Natalie Zett:

I was in St Paul, I had graduated from Luther Seminary a few years before and got a job in IT, because when you graduate from Hogwarts, what do you do? You got to get something you know normal. So I was working and still a journalist and I got this thing a year after my dad died. My Aunt Pearl sent this thing to me and I thought she was dead for one thing. And she said I bet you're surprised to hear from me. I thought, god, no kidding. And then I started opening this thing up I didn't know who any of these people were and backtracking a little bit. Krista, I had been to Chicago a number of times. One of my closest friends, who's turned out actually to be a second cousin we didn't know that either. Thank you Ancestry she took me through, and every time I'd go to Chicago I thought, god, this seems familiar, even my moves. I ended up following in the footsteps of this, my Aunt Martha, without knowing it, and it gets more convoluted. But that's where this thing started, and I was a journalist so I certainly knew how to research, didn't know a whole heck of a lot about doing genealogy, but my Aunt Pearl said well, forgive me, krista, but she said the Mormons have this thing called on the computer. It's called FamilySearch. I think you should look that up, they might be able to help. So she was ahead of me, even in her 80s, and I said, okay, so, but Krista, I had no clue. I was like all thumbs. So I just started looking and I thought, and I looked at the movements through this document. One of the other significant things is that family my great-great-grandmother and her children so the part of them went off to Chicago. This part stayed only about an hour and a half from where I had moved.

Natalie Zett:

When I first came up here, everything seemed familiar and it was so far removed from Johnstown or Cleveland, ann Arbor where I went to school, or Detroit where I lived. There was nothing like it. Yet I knew it and it was just this feeling of this is where I belong. Yep, they'll carry me out in the box here, and so that was going on. And so I had Pearl, the manuscript, like the mummy's hand, brought it back to life. And then when I realized that it wasn't known, I thought what the heck? So I just started writing articles about her and they got attention from the Minneapolis Star Tribune and things like that. But I didn't want attention from me. I thought this is wrong, Just because we're of this class of people and no one was famous or careening into an iceberg. No, I thought, if I don't stand up for them, I'm not sure who's going to do that. And there were people that were and are. But the focus is always on the weapon of murder, the ship. My focus is who are you?

Crista Cowan:

What was the moment that you realized that you know? I mean, was it? It was in the manuscript that Pearl was telling you about this family history? But when did Martha become a real person for you?

Natalie Zett:

When, when I opened the manuscript thank you for that when I opened the manuscript a little newspaper clipping fell out and I grabbed it and it was. It was cut off. It was from the Chicago Herald, july 25th 1915. There was a row of let's see, I think, three photos. Three photos below, circled, was Martha Pfeiffer, and I looked and I thought that's my grandmother's last name, her maiden name. That's where it started and I put this in my book because I made my book fiction, because no one's going to believe this stuff actually happened the way it did. But I swear that I had seen her before earlier in my life and I remember when we were a little watching the Wizard of Oz or something, and there was a woman coming in and out and I thought who is that? And you know like my mom said, oh, come on, quit making stuff up. I said I'm not.

Natalie Zett:

But again, given my family history on my dad's side, my dad's history actually helped me quickly connect. I thought I know what's going on here. I don't want this to be happening, but I know. Because of my experience and because of being related to these people, I knew what was happening and I thought, oh, not now, not a year after my dad died not all this stuff, and I started putting together a family tree because that wasn't so successful in third grade. But then I would also my journalist rational side would just put all the stuff together and then I would just break down and cry.

Natalie Zett:

I thought, how, how can I go? Well, not half my life, but how can I go all these years not know this? And I knew her. It was just something that I can't explain to you. And I thought, whatever it takes, I'm going to make sure people know about you. And I had no idea what I meant and I thought, oh crap, I'm going to become my father's parent, I mean my father's people. I'm going to be one of those people, but I'm not going to read anyone's palm or anything like that. But that's how that started. Did I explain that in a way that makes sense? Yeah, absolutely yeah. And you know what?

Crista Cowan:

I completely believe that.

Natalie Zett:

I've had enough experiences myself.

Crista Cowan:

the more you get involved in family history, the more you realize that some of us that are drawn to it are drawn to it because we know those people, because they are present for us and we want to make sure that their stories are told. So you'd had this experience as a child. You kind of you mentioned you were following in her footsteps without even knowing it. But then you open that manuscript, that article falls out, what, like you recognize the surname. When was it you realized exactly who she was and how she was related to you?

Natalie Zett:

Intellectually right away, you know, but emotionally I was like jello, I could not wrap my mind around it and then I couldn't really talk to anybody about it because it's like but also it was my mother's history and there wasn't much on the Internet. But then all of a sudden this wonderful website it's long gone now popped up with all this history. And it was a woman who just loved the stuff. She was not related to anybody and I printed the stuff out and I looked at it and I kept trying to take it and take it and take it and I sent it to my mother because it was her history. She knew nothing about her mother and I always felt so bad that she didn't have a mom and she was such a good mom to us and I said, mom, this is who your people are. She couldn't take it in. She was very, you know, she also is just, it's so emotional and I thought how could I have this much of my family history not present and not know about it and yet still follow? These people move to where they moved. I've met plenty of relatives in Wisconsin in that small village where the people, my great-great-grandmother settled. They had all the history, they knew it. They even had a book for the town of a thousand people. I thought all small towns in Wisconsin came with books, but and that was related to a thousand people. I thought all small towns in Wisconsin came with books, but and I was related to all these people. And so, krista, I grew up thinking I was a small family with very few people and we're weird on that side, but who cares too? I had to expand and I wasn't ready. I'm still grieving my father, but you know what, ready or not, I had to move. And I also thought, my God, anybody who would have known her in 1997, 98 would be dead except my.

Natalie Zett:

Her youngest brother was still alive and he lived up in winter Wisconsin, near Hayward, wisconsin, if you know where that is. He married an indigenous woman and so he was actually kind of well. He was part of the Dillinger thing in Chicago. We don't talk much about that, but he but he had to get out of Chicago very quickly at one point and he settled down. So, yeah, we had some wild people in the family, sounds like it. But I tried to talk to him but he was just not in a state where he could and then I kept going down to Chicago and spending time with Aunt Pearl that was. She was hopefully what I can become at some point. She opened the door and we'd stay up all night. She was in her eighties. We'd stay up all night. She's living in hometown, which is right outside, was one of those places that was built for the returning GIs during World War II. They built it up Small house, small, humble house, and then she and I would go to the cemeteries and we would find things and she could find everything, and she was just one of those people who had this. That journalist mind was still there, and so I spent all this time with her and I got to meet some living relatives, including one that was four years old when Aunt Martha was killed and she was still. This woman was still alive and she said I said I remember her in the coffin. She had roses in her hair, a pink dress, and that was something else.

Natalie Zett:

And then the one story that I really ought to tell you was the first time I came down to Chicago by myself no sense of direction, gps was not a thing back then and I went to Bethania Cemetery in Justice, illinois, labor Day weekend. Nobody's there. It's huge. It's not as big as Grandview in Johnstown where I was born. But I thought, oh no, what did I do? And I felt so foolish and what I didn't realize even after I was traipsing up and down, up and down, up and down, I parked right in front of my family's graves, but I didn't see it. I still don't know what that is. Then, when I saw it, I just collapsed. I said I didn't know you were here, I'm so sorry. And I was just. I think I had to be broken down emotionally and I don't think, had my dad not died the previous year, I wouldn't have been open to this, I would have just thrown it in a drawer and said that's nice. But it was almost as if everything converged and then I thought how did I find this? And then I went back to, because I was writing a story for a newspaper about this. So I went back, rushed back.

Natalie Zett:

Then, when I got back to my apartment I guess you will believe this stuff things started happening in my little apartment in St Paul, like stuff falling off of the refrigerator. We're not on a fault line up here for earthquakes, and it was just. Things were happening and I thought, oh gosh, what did I do? And I could feel at that point I was living alone. I could feel somebody else in there and I thought what did I bring back with me? And I called my mother because you call mommy when you're scared and I said, mom, I think I brought something back with me from Chicago that I didn't intend. And she said what's that? Aunt Martha? She said well, maybe you did, and she's not going to hurt you. So get to know her, hang up, you know she was. My mom was really uncomfortable with a lot of my dad's family shenanigans. But so I thought let's just pretend this is actually happening, because it is, and I can't talk to anybody, which is the best place to, because I was back in the corner, back in a corner, and I thought let's just go with this. And I wasn't ready emotionally, I wasn't ready physically, I wasn't ready in any shape to do this. But I did it. I just kept going. I thought let's go to Fall Creek and meet these people, let's go to Chicago, let's do it, and soon.

Natalie Zett:

I had my article done, I had the beginnings of what became a book, because it was like getting so big. But when the time came where I thought I might really put this together and publish the book. I was in a car accident or bad one, and it took about eight years to recover memory and things like that back and you don't ever recover from something like that. But because I had this manuscript and all the details from Pearl's document, it helped my memory come back. So I thought and then 2016, a couple I work in IT for the state of Minnesota and a couple of friends I was working at the Department of Health said I think you ought to take this thing, this ancestry testing, get your DNA done. I said, oh, my Aunt, pearl, gave me this information. I know who my family is. No, no, you need to do this. I know who they are. And then they showed me pie charts and I thought, oh, okay, so I did this thing called the ancestry DNA test. It's like that in and of itself has been quite the shock, but it also cemented what I found.

Natalie Zett:

So eventually I was able to fill out the things in the book that weren't very good and I thought, when I published the book, I didn't care who wanted it, but I knew my mom had to have it before she died, so I rushed it to her 2021. She died a few weeks later, but she knew the contents, but she had her book. I said this is your history, ma, and I didn't want her to depart without that promise being kept. And Pearl had died quite a few years before. But I thought Pearl did it. Pearl said do something with this, do something with this. I said I did something with it and so that's what happened. I mean, there's some other things that were occurring, but my moves, the things, and any time I would look up something, I would find it, and it was almost too easy. But here's where it really switched.

Natalie Zett:

And you asked me about my podcast. I thought I was done with this because I had to do the audio book and that, if anybody's ever done an audio book, oh, that will bring you to your knees. It was really tough. I had to do everything from scratch during the pandemic and I did it. And then I was on a number of talk shows, including Coast to Coast. You know sort of the paranormal circuit. That's where people Amazon put my book as a paranormal book, which I thought was to be a history book. But I thought, oh well, but I really did not care. I thought this needs to hit whoever it hits. I'm not doing this for my ego. I'm doing this because I kept a promise. That's all there was to it and I thought I will take care of you and your history. You don't have to take care of me, I've already. I know how to do that and people that I was. When I was on these shows they were asking me questions, like you are, and I thought I never thought of that and I thought, so I have the microphone, did the fricking book? I thought, well, okay, I'll just do a podcast and answer these things. And November of last year October of last year maybe I thought I had a sing song voice in my head and I thought, when that happens, it's not going to leave me alone. It said you've got to expand this world. There's more to it than this. You've got to expand the world of Chicago in 1915. And I thought, oh no, but I did.

Natalie Zett:

I started looking on Google Books and I found a court document from, I think, 1934 about a family, the estate of a family of two brothers who were killed on the Eastland and they were still trying to settle some things. But it was the surname Ristow. I'd seen that in my list of DNA matches. So I thought, oh Lord. And then I began to do more and more research on different people finding things, and I would look in there's certain places where I would expect to find information about them. There was nothing. So I realized if I didn't tell their stories, given the time, given the stuff is buried in Google Books and Hathatrust and weird documents. I have a list of weird places and eBay. I found an auction item on eBay that was going for $500. And I was able to talk them way down out of that a letter from a doctor who was a witness, who wrote to another man who was there and they could. They, you know, connected years later. I had a lot of those stories.

Natalie Zett:

So I was finding all this stuff in these, these weird publications and I started talking about them and I thought, wow, and my thing was, I didn't want to get to know them. I would say I want to know you. I didn't want to get to know them. I would say I want to know you, guide me. They have complied.

Natalie Zett:

And so each week I come up with something that I don't even know what's going to happen. I do all the research and I always say to folks. Look, this is my research project for the week. I'm liable to make mistakes, I'm just that kind of person, but I said they've waited long enough. The institutions that have been kind of trusted with their history have not done the best job with it, or else they've focused. What they've done is they focused on the ship and are a few stories, and I thought there are 800 fricking people beyond that. They all deserve to have their stories told, whether they're the young Greek immigrant guy that just has a little obituary or whatever, or entire families, or the ones and twos that just kind of got lost.

Natalie Zett:

I thought, no, I will tell all your stories. Don't know how, but I will. But so far it's been relatively easy to find them and there's no end to this podcast because there's so many of them. So that's what happened and it's pulled forth from me things I didn't even know I had, because I do everything. I mean it's just me myself.

Natalie Zett:

I I do all the artwork for the little posters that I make each week to tell the stories, and I'm just a graphic designer. I'm actually a terrible artist, but I'm a really good graphic designer and I work for corporate doing some of that stuff, and I worked for corporate doing some of that stuff and I thought let's, you know, parlay that into this. I do the audio, I do the writing and I just want to make sure those stories are out there. And I got some good news from one of our local institutions here. It hasn't happened yet.

Natalie Zett:

They want all of my stuff, so at least it can be preserved and I'll be so grateful to have that done, because it's a lot of work done, a lot of documentation and the ghost of Elizabeth Schoen Mills I know she's still alive, but it's just like I hear source citation. So it's like I'm being on source citation and it's important because there's still a lot of what I found it wasn't source cited. So I said I can't use that and I bring that up each week because it's like you know what, yeah, I am into. Some of the people would call the woo stuff, but when I document something it's like I'm going to make sure that this is documented within an inch of its life, because they deserve nothing less and they've had so little, I think because of who they were.

Crista Cowan:

So there's this just really interesting thing that happens, and I think it happens to a lot of people.

Crista Cowan:

Just really interesting thing that happens and I think it happens to a lot of people and and you've laid it out really beautifully because I think, probably because of the way that your journalist brain works that you had this personal connection.

Crista Cowan:

You know Martha was a presence in your life. You wanted to know and tell her story, which led you to the family story, but it also led you to this Eastland disaster. And the convergence of those two things, I think, is again something that happens to a lot of people, and it's not always about a disaster, but sometimes it's about a community or it's about a historical moment or like there's something that connects us to more people. But then you just kind of busting that wide open and being able to then gratefully go back to her and share that with her before she passed over. But this presence of Aunt Martha, I'm just so fascinated by her and my question, my next question I guess, is like, has she continued to be a presence in your life through this whole experience, or was it just enough to be the catalyst to get you started?

Natalie Zett:

She's she's always here. I mean, it's like she. We went my partner is an artist, a fairly well-known artist, and we went to the grave site together. After she and I got together, gosh, I wish we had done that a little darker, and it could look so much better. And as we were watching it she said is it my imagination, or is that thing getting darker? I said no, I don't think it is. I think it's actually so. Aunt Martha colors, she's with us. No, she's very much, I think, with us.

Natalie Zett:

And even I know it was difficult for my sister to kind of wrap her mind around all this, because she's really not the partaking of this. Firsthand, she's in Ohio, but now she talks about her too. She goes well, you know, it's talks about her as if she has made her acquaintance and things like that. I think it was so overwhelming for her emotionally and I allow her her journey, because coming to this stuff is different for everybody. But yeah, she's always here. And I think, Krista, she's the one that said you can't stop with me. And my mother would say that too, if she were alive. She'd say Natalie, it's not just about us, you know, you have to take care of everybody.

Crista Cowan:

And that's kind of where I was headed with that, so I'm glad that that's where that landed which is your Aunt Martha was this bridge for you to your family, but she's also become this bridge to you, to this group of people that she had this connection to. And so, as you've started uncovering these stories, then from the Eastland you know, you mentioned some familiar surnames, obviously because it was a group of people who worked together. I'm sure there were family members and you know a community of people. So there's going to be a lot of connections in that community. But is there a particular story or person so far that has just really impacted you?

Natalie Zett:

One that I think they all have. I mean, they're all my favorite children at this point, but there's one that there's quite a few that I didn't expect that I'd ever find. They're not on anybody's radar. That's the most chilling thing of this.

Crista Cowan:

They were nowhere, was there no list of total casualties.

Natalie Zett:

There was Okay, chicago, I'm sorry, cook County Coroners. There's a couple lists, but here's the thing Numbers have been thrown around. You know all this time, you know there's certain numbers that are repeated. Where is the list that is not just source-cited but it would need to be peer-reviewed? I've never seen one. I've heard numbers. People lead off with numbers. That makes me nervous sometimes, because it's like you know what. You become dead to the effect when you just hear the sensational.

Natalie Zett:

The stories that are told, that are repeated are. They're dramatic I mean, entire families were lost and things like that but after a while you don't hear it anymore. What about the Greek immigrant fellow that came? What about the little boxer that I profiled last week in the website I mean my website as well as my podcast? He was only 19. He was an amateur boxer. What about him? What about these other people? So they're all important to me, I think, when I do them, but there's no one that stands out. There were.

Natalie Zett:

What was so startling, though, krista, were the number of people who wrote letters to the editor in these one-off papers, like real small papers. In Chicago, new Jersey, was another place where they had a lot of people, I know, because Western Electric had a presence in New York and a lot of them ended up in Chicago better opportunities, right, kind of like my family. It's like no, not so much, but they're all important at the time and the way I treat them is the way I was treated when I was first learning how to do genealogy. I took a lot of classes with Sunny and Lisa Louise and they treated my family like they were their family and that's what I do. And so I think there's no, some of them are just striking, but the documentation, I would say it's very documentation, uneven, and I'm trying to be diplomatic here because I do get a little like oh, but there was one.

Natalie Zett:

Okay, let me tell you one. This is unbelievable, I think, about this guy. This guy's doing penance in the afterlife. He was a person who was robbing corpses down at the dock. He was arrested and then he went on to make a story up about himself, about how he rescued all these people on the Eastland and he would go on the Speaker's Circuit and on Vaudeville and he was basically. I mean, there were newspaper articles saying this guy's a fraud. The Carnegie, whatever, I can't think. Commission, whatever they were. They had a heroes commission thing. They said we don't know this guy and people don't do this sort of thing. So he was going on and he went on and on forever and he was always where there were disasters and he was always saving people. And they still certain places still tout this guy as a hero.

Natalie Zett:

And I thought, oh, listen, buddy boy, we're going to talk about you. So I devoted a whole episode to this guy and all I did was read the newspapers and then he died. He was actually like a perfume salesman or like a ladies lingerie salesman or something. He died this is karma in the stardust hotel gift shop in las vegas and I thought, see, but what I did was I thought listen, you, you are going, we're going to tell your story and we're you're going to do you're an example of what's happened to this. The Eastland. There's been a lot of, if not outright, con artists, people that are sloppy in their work about this, and I think that's why it's suffered so much, not because of the population, not because of anything else, but because the story has been gatekeepered, if you want to call it that.

Crista Cowan:

It's a new, it's not even a word, but you know what I mean.

Natalie Zett:

Yeah, absolutely, and I get really animated about that and it's just, oh. So I think part of Martha's involvement was like oh no, you can't stop here, because this is not right. And so I get a little Nellie Bly, joan of Arc on that. But I thought, okay, take that, funnel it into telling their stories.

Natalie Zett:

And I was working with a woman, a PhD student, and she also shared some stories with me that are even more disturbing. And she said, natalie, you're on your own with this. I said, no, I'm not. I've got about 800, some that help me each week. All I have to do is tell their story. And now people want my manuscripts, I mean want the work that I've done, and they will keep it and they will take care of it and it will be there for people. It's no longer lost stories or whatever. And I thought, yeah, so Arthur Loeb, he's the guy, the con artist he's, he's done a lot of my work for me, because it's like, ok, he was long ago, but these types of people exist. And what I didn't realize is there were so many of them, but I couldn't believe what I was reading it and what.

Crista Cowan:

I didn't realize is there were so many of them, but I couldn't believe what. I was reading. It's just so unbelievable. So he was the most memorable one because he was the worst.

Natalie Zett:

Yeah, sounds like it. He wasn't the only one. Glad you asked, krista, I am, absolutely I am.

Crista Cowan:

So you know Martha led you to your family history. She led you to this disaster. Now you've got all of these other people whose stories you're telling and I love that you're doing that. You've got, you know, endless stories that you can tell. As you're sharing those stories out into the world, are they connecting with descendants or family members of those other passengers? You connected to the Eastland because of your familial connection. I guess what I'm asking is is it trickling back out to the descendants and family members of the others whose stories you're telling.

Natalie Zett:

It is. There was one guy who was a descendant of the Cook County coroner, pete Hoffman, who reached out. He goes hey, thank you for being kind to my was a great great grandfather. Because Pete Hoffman was a controversial figure and I kind of liked him because he was just kind of you know, he was himself and they actually kind of immortalized him in the play and in the film front page and so he, one of his descendants, reached out, another descendant of one. There was a young couple. I called them the Rose and Jack of the Eastland. They died together. They were buried actually together even though they never married.

Natalie Zett:

And one of his relatives from, I think, slovakia, reached out, and a lot of people from Slovakia because of my ancestry they reach out. There's not a ton from there. And there was a woman who wrote an article in the Chicago Genealogical Society's, one of their magazines, a few years ago. I finally reached her, asked permission to tell the story and she said oh yeah, let me give you these photos. And so she gave me photos of her. I think it was her granddad who was a rescuer, but he never talked about it, but he got one of the stars that the coroner was handing out. So not a ton. But I don't expect that with podcasts, for the most part people don't reach out all the time For someone like you who already has, let's just say, quite a presence. You are a presence and you've done so much good work in this. Of course you would, but me. It's like I'm just this person who does this. But the beautiful thing of a podcast, unlike a book, unlike anything else, it can go anywhere. I've got a huge fan base. Let's see, I did a whole thing on Lithuanian the Lithuanians in Chicago and I got a rock group to give in Lithuania current rock group to give me some of their music. So I opened with their music and they were happy to share it with me. So, yeah, sure, and then I butchered Lithuanian language when I was trying to read it. I said I apologize for the entire country of Lithuania for what I'm about to do, but they thought it was fun. And so I got a lot of fans there and in Finland and a lot overseas, which surprises me Australia, canada and different places.

Natalie Zett:

So again, I never expect much to happen. I just expect that I will do a good job and I expect that I will honor these people. If anybody cares, cares, great, and really, when it comes to people policing, I'm not really good at it anyway in a given moment. So I just want to do what's right and I think, until somebody else comes along, I'm probably the best one to do it, because I have the. It's a drive. I mean, you wouldn't do this on your own unless you were. But this is just like. This is so wrong. And again, I do have a thing about justice.

Natalie Zett:

Some of my early articles were, let's just say, taking on things that were happening in other milieus and I thought, oh, I'm going to end this, but I've mellowed out a little bit, but not that much, and I just thought, no, this will be righted, the ship will be righted, the stories will be told. That's why I like the title of your podcast too. It's like, yes, and I believe in the power of the story, krista, to write anything, and I also let the dead speak. I don't editorialize very much, I'll just say here's the article, draw your own conclusions. This is how they spoke in 1915.

Natalie Zett:

And I pulled out all the newspapers from that time too. There was a trade journal of newspapers. They had about 10, 15 newspapers that gave their accounts of all these people and what they did, how they got the story, how they told the story, how they tried to scoop each other. It's crazy and it's just that kind of thing. But, and like I said, last week I did a whole thing on amateur boxing and found out that there were women boxers in 1915 too. So I bring the greater history of 1915 in the progressive era that was coming in the labor strifes. There was a lot of stuff going on there that's kind of similar to what happens later on in history. So when you know what's happened before, you can put your own time and context. So long answer to your very short question. That's kind of what's happened. That's how it's evolved.

Crista Cowan:

Yeah, well, it sounds like it's been a beautiful evolution from your, you know, days in grade school to your manuscript, from Aunt Pearl to the presence that is Aunt Martha and these stories that you are compelled to tell. But I think you are compelled to tell because you are the person to tell them, and thank you so much for the time to get to know you a little bit and see a peek into your world and the world of the Eastland. Before I let you go, I would just love to know you know you're only really a few years into telling these stories what is your hope for the future?

Natalie Zett:

To keep going. I mean you get better too as you go along. I mean I look at this into my earlier podcast and it's like, oh well, but you know what, don't worry about perfection if anybody wants to start something like this. And when I taught writing, I would say, look, that's constant course correction. I taught writing at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and I think just to get better and to get more in tune and to and I think, just to get better and to get more in tune and to just and listen, to always listen. It's like who wants to be profiled this week? Oh, okay, here you go. Let's go to this weird publication oh, look at that. And to be and not ever put a barrier up for myself Don't be a gatekeeper and I'm very generous and I always like to instruct people how I get this information.

Natalie Zett:

The Eastlands suffered from kind of lack of transparency. It's like this is how I'm getting this. You can do it too if you want. And so there's no, there is magic, but that's not the magic part. The magic part is the listening, I think, to the departed souls. So I just hope to keep on as long as I can. There's a lot of people, krista, more than I thought, and thank you for giving me this opportunity. It is an honor to meet you after all. This time it's like I'm talking to you. I mean deep respect for all you've done for the genealogical community and people at the University of Minnesota know you too, by the way oh, wow.

Crista Cowan:

You are beyond genealogy.

Natalie Zett:

Your borders, too, expand Well. Stories are important Well stories are important.

Crista Cowan:

People's stories are important. You know, I think maybe my heart about that, and so thank you for letting me hear a little bit about your heart for that, because I think together we will make sure that the stories that need to be told will be told, and we can then model that for so many others to go out and find the stories that they are the ones to tell. Thank you, thank you Krista.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Crista Cowan | The Barefoot Genealogist

Host