Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

From Cemetery to Courtroom: The Eastland Aftermath

• Natalie Zett

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Welcome to all the new listeners, especially those from Ireland! Since there are so many new folks, I provide background on the origin of my podcast, which is tied to my book Flower in the River about the 1915 Eastland Disaster in Chicago. I also talk about the power of world building in genealogy and how understanding our ancestors' times can help us understand them and us better.

In the segment “From eBay to Eastland,” I recount finding an Eastland Disaster court document listed for sale on eBay...for a lot of money! I then located the same document on Google Books--for free! In the case of public domain documents, you might want to make Google Books your one-stop shopping place.

A name on the court document led me to research two Eastland Disaster victims who were new to me. Meet William Ristow and his brother Herman Ristow — and learn about their lives and the aftermath. Serendipitously, I found ancestral connections to the Ristow name.

I summarize William Ristow’s estate’s lawsuit contesting the ship owner’s limited liability. This took place 19 years after the Eastland Disaster. After appeals, the court ruled in favor of the owner. I reflect on justice denied to victims’ families.


Public Domain books

Using Google Books

Photos

Forest Home (Waldheim) Cemetery and Haymarket Memorial

Music (Artlist)

  • Borrtex - Memoir of Solitude
  • Jean-Miles Carter - Gladys Aylward
  • Yuval Vilner - Nocturne in E Flat Major Op 9 No 2.
  • Yoav Ilan - Sky Blue
  • Ardie Son - Departures
  • Marcelo Nami - Estudio en Mi Menor
  • Romeo - Fragility
Natalie Zett:

Now it's cold here in Minnesota because it is early November and I'm not complaining. Especially after the last summer and for Halloween we had not quite a snowstorm, but it was significant and it was formidable, but it melted. But snow will be back really soon and during the past few weeks I want to say that we have had a number of brand new listeners according to my podcast statistics, and I want to continue to give a big shout out to the folks from Ireland. That has been totally unexpected. I've always been fascinated by Ireland. I spend some time there and it is everything you think it might be. It's magical and unfortunately I don't think I have any Irish ancestry in me, but my grandmother's first husband was a man from Ireland. He was of course his name had to be something like John Donovan, because it was and he was from County Kirk, ireland. But John died and she married a second time to the guy who would become my grandfather, and for me that was fortunate.

Natalie Zett:

I've shared previously that those of us whose ancestors immigrated to the United States and that's most of us in the United States we often think about those places that they come from. A lot of times people go back and certainly people like myself have done a lot of research and thanks to the wonders of DNA we have been able to connect with those people across the pond, as we call them. But because we're so US centric, because you know where we grew up, it's hard to kind of step out of that. We never consider what the descendants of those who did not immigrate. What was life like for them? How did they perceive us? To me that's really been fascinating to connect with these people and to sometimes learn that they're as fascinated with us as we are with them. And I'm not sure what it is about Ireland, but I love it so much and I'm happy that you're here and I want to say too let's see if I can get this. I hope I got that right. It means a thousand welcomes, or it's supposed to mean one thousand welcomes. Forgive me if I mangled Irish Gaelic and I'll promise to try to do better next time. But welcome to you all.

Natalie Zett:

And because each week there are a lot of new listeners, I want to do a brief summary of what this podcast is about. I originally created it to support my book Flower in the River, and the book is about the death of a relative who perished in 1915 in Chicago. And not only did she die 843 other people died as well when a ship called the Eastland capsized. And the podcast is also an outgrowth of so many questions and so much feedback that I received when I was on various podcasts during the first year after the publication of the book. And what remains particularly strange and sometimes sad to me is that the Eastland disaster of 1915 has been largely forgotten. You wouldn't think that could happen in a place like Chicago, but it happened and I'm doing my best to bring it in front of people's consciousness.

Natalie Zett:

So, in order to honor those who departed, and although I grew up not knowing much of anything about my mother's maternal line in Chicago when my mother's much older sister reached out to me with a document she created. She was in her 80s at this point and I was already an established writer. She gave this document to me and we established a relationship, friendship, and as she was going toward the end of her life, she said please do something with this. I don't want all this work to be lost when I'm gone. And without knowing what I was getting into, I said, yeah, sure, and I've always wanted to keep that promise to her and to the other departed. And so the book, the podcast, everything I do around this is my attempt to keep that promise.

Natalie Zett:

And, ironically or not, back when I was putting the information together for what would become this book, various friends and colleagues in the journalism world said to me well, don't you want to write the great American novel or write a book? And I would always respond, heck, no, that's too much work and really books aren't all that unless you're somebody you know really big like Stephen King. And I wasn't interested. I was doing very well with my journalistic career, writing for trade magazines, newspapers and consumer magazines, so that was just fine. I enjoyed it it was. It kept my writing chops going, etc. So the idea of doing a book was never something that I dreamed of one day. But it's funny even if you don't dream of something, the dream might be planted inside you, just waiting for something to make it emerge.

Natalie Zett:

And when I began getting all this information together and putting it into a book format, I had no expectation that anyone would want to read it. I wrote it for my family. I wrote it primarily for my mother, who, by the time I was getting ready to get it published, she was getting ready to leave this earth, so I pushed it out there, got it to her about two weeks before she passed away and as far as I was concerned, I had done my part. I saw that is fate, a company move on. But of course that didn't happen.

Natalie Zett:

There's something very freeing, I have to say too, when you release yourself from any types of expectations that people will be interested in what you're doing creatively and when you do it just for the love of doing it or when you do it. But I also wanted to keep that promise and, as I've often said, there's nothing that's been more precious to me than being able to give my mother the gift of her history, even though she got the book right before she died, she knew what I was doing for all these years and I would send her bits and pieces of things that I had found. I would send her chapters to look at things like that, so she was very aware of what was happening, and since she grew up without her mother and without her mother's histories, most of this stuff just blew her away as well, so it was delightful to be able to give her something that you can't buy online. My main goal for doing any type of creative work is freedom. Freedom is the thing that drives me Freedom to experiment, freedom to color outside the lines, freedom to try new things and, as you know, if you try new things or anything in the public sphere, you're going to get some blowback, and even when that happens, I never want that to stop me from going forward and I never want that to stop you from taking a chance and doing something. And, of course, it's always nice to get encouragement from people that you respect and people who have been doing the type of work that you've done, but for a longer amount of time.

Natalie Zett:

I recently listened to an interview with Hank Jones, who is an extraordinary genealogist and writer and actor and so many things. His book Psychic Roots 1 and 2 is phenomenal what he did in terms of branching out into the unexplained parts of genealogy and he came to this conclusion. He said we are a unique bunch of people he's talking about genealogists and we are unusual in how we get excited over finding a grave, for example, and doesn't necessarily speak to other people. And I think that that was awesome to hear him express it that way because, yeah, we are kind of that and accept it and work with it and make it work for you. And I'm convinced, after doing this type of work for over 25 years and also talking to other people who are deep into genealogy, deep into family history, that a lot of us feel that we hear the calling of our departed ones and, again, it's not that far fetched considering that they make up our blood. So I think it's really interesting and important to honor them because as we honor them, in a sense we honor our own lives and the journeys that we take.

Natalie Zett:

A lot of times I'll speak for myself I'm kind of hard on myself. I'm harder on myself than I could be on anybody else. So it's kind of nice to look back and just say, yeah, not too bad, you did all right, and I think we need to do that for ourselves and for those we care about frequently sometimes, as well as push them along a little bit right. And again, I started this podcast because I was inspired by the questions that other people asked of me when I was on various podcasts during that first year of publication, and I realized that I wasn't ever probably going to be done with any of this, because this, too, is like a tree that's branching out. It keeps expanding and it covers everything from genealogy to the art of writing, to current technology trends.

Natalie Zett:

I really love technology. I try to keep up with technology. Had AI been available when I was writing, I'm not sure I would have used it the way some people are using it, but I definitely would have consulted it for a second opinion. And how I use AI now primarily is to create AI-generated artwork, and this really helps me because I have worked as a designer and it helps bring my designs to life. So I think that's wonderful and this technology is worth exploring, simply because it will eventually affect your life.

Natalie Zett:

So, returning to the topic of genealogy, which is what this podcast is mostly about. When you get into genealogy at first, if you feel called to it, you want to find your people, whoever they are, your ancestors, your relatives, and it's a lot of fun. At first. It can be exhilarating, particularly if you are working online and you can find so many things because so many things are available that once weren't there. But first, when I was beginning my genealogy adventure, I wanted to see how far back I could go in my family tree, because I was told we didn't have much of a family history, which right now sounds ridiculous, but back then I kind of bought into that and I thought I didn't have many expectations. So I was delightfully surprised that I could go back very far. As you grow, as I grew in this area of genealogy I would say I matured and I became interested in other things, not just building up a family tree, not just collecting a bunch of photographs, but I began to want to understand the world in which my ancestors lived and so I wanted to begin the process of world building.

Natalie Zett:

I've thought about well, what was it like in 1915 when the Eastland capsized? I've got a pretty good understanding of what happened with my family. I wrote a book about it. And yet this didn't just happen to my family. It happened to 844 people in total, and there were entire families that were wiped out. And there were a number of other families who lost their daughters, their sons, their mothers, their fathers. They lost a spouse. How were those who survived either the Eastland disaster itself, or who were the ones who remained? How did this affect the rest of their days? So I naturally wanted to spread a wider net and to get a better idea of what all this entailed. What was this like back in 1915?

Natalie Zett:

So, while I obviously have been reading sections of the book and talking about the people in the book to whom I was related, the podcast has also caused me to want to bring in other people to whom I'm not related, but either who were affected by the Eastland or who have influenced my journey. And that's been just as enriching, I think, for me and for other people who want to understand the different layers of all this. And it's also been important to me to bring in stories from the other sides of my family and not just to focus in on my mother's maternal line. It's important to consider all these things. I can't prove this, but I can say by my own experience in talking to other genealogy enthusiasts that eventually all of us move beyond just the aspect of getting names, birth dates, birthplaces, death dates to the point where we want to know the stories of the people that we're investigating. We want to know the stories of the people to whom we are related, and it's always challenging when it's such a long time ago and you didn't know these people. But therein lies the richness of this journey and the thing that keeps me in here is this ongoing, forever challenge of asking the question who were these people?

Natalie Zett:

And a lot of people again start off as collectors. To an extent, we all start off as collectors. We inherit something from a long ago, relative, or we just like to collect photos. But when I was a kid and I would look at all these different things that we had around our house, it never occurred to me that these old timey photos and these old timey quilts and such had stories attached to them. The photos were people who had lives, who they laughed, they cried. They had everything that could happen to a human being happen to them. As a little kid, though, I didn't know this and I didn't know how to tap into it at that point. But I knew that there was more to this than just collecting things and having trophies, and I wanted a deeper relationship with the departed, even though that seemed difficult to do.

Natalie Zett:

Speaking of collecting, so this week I stumbled over literally stumbled over some fascinating online discoveries and I'm going to call this part of the podcast from eBay to Eastland. Also, this segment has a cautionary tale, and here's why Last week I was searching for Eastland postcards on eBay to see if there was anything new. I have been surprised at the number of Eastland items I have found throughout the years on eBay, but instead I found a document related to the Eastland tragedy and it was listed for a whopping $75. Wait, it gets better. It gets better. So the twist this document that was being sold for $75 is available on Google books for free, mm-hmm.

Natalie Zett:

So I want to say that I have a very dear friend who often takes public domain documents and that's what these are on Google books, and what he does is he spends a lot of time updating them, freshening them up, giving them new exciting covers, repairing the type setting, making it legible, providing behind-the-scenes information, adding his own commentary. In other words, he takes something old, cleans it up and makes it beautiful and useful again. I'm not talking about that. This is a labor of love for this friend and everything he sells is affordable and what he's doing is great, and it's something actually I would like to do, but I don't want to charge anybody $75 for that. On the other hand, whoever was selling this document on Ebate? All they did was looks like they copied it from Google books and didn't really bother repackaging it. It looked the same as what I found on Google books and I don't know. To each one's own. But is this legal? Probably. But is this ethical? Well, I'll let you be the judge of that. I have my own opinions about that.

Natalie Zett:

But here's the thing I want to encourage everyone to spread the word to friends and family, especially those who might be just starting their family history genealogy adventures. Many people are not tech savvy, and that's okay. Not everybody lives in this IT world. I have been doing IT work since the early 90s and so I know a lot, but I also know that I don't know a lot and I have to keep learning and keep challenging myself and keep up with the continuing education. So it is an ongoing challenge to stay current and stay with what is going on in the IT world. But I live and breathe this stuff, but people who don't it can be kind of frightening for them.

Natalie Zett:

So please help your family and friends not feel bad about asking those kinds of questions. In fact, recently I saw on one of the genealogy Facebook groups that I'm a part of that someone did not know how to do copy and paste and the people were so kind to her they bothered to explain to her what she needed to do and they wanted to make sure she was comfortable. So sometimes it just takes that People just need to be able to ask questions and then people need to respond kindly to people who don't know, because, please remember, a lot of people didn't grow up with this and I do have a number of people in my family who well, some people just have an aversion to technology and if they're going to be doing any kind of work in this area probably any area anymore helping them to get past that, I think, is a good way to be a good friend. And back to genealogy world If you're new to this or you're getting reacquainted with it, don't forget to look for documents in free places like Google books, you will be surprised at what you can find, and please make that your first stop. And there's also another site from the University of Michigan which is called Hathatrust. I'll put the name in the show notes so you can find it. But that's also another useful, very useful site, in fact, and I've been able to find documents there that I was unable to find on Google books. So it's worth checking it out, and I know Google books can also be kind of intimidating for people. So I want to throw you a lifeline, and that is in the form of Lisa Louise Cook's website, genealogy Gems. She does a podcast and I would really encourage you to. If you want to learn anything about anything related to genealogy, but particularly about Google books, go to Lisa Louise's website or her YouTube page. Again, I will put links in the show notes because, I have to say, for so many of us, she has been the one who's instructed us in all the facets of family history, research, genealogy, and she also is quite the tech wizard and really knows her way around the world of Google. So remember, if you're on eBay or one of these sites that's selling a book, before you press buy, make sure to go to Google books to see if your book is available for free.

Natalie Zett:

But back to this document that I found on eBay, then found it on Google books, but at first, honestly, was kind of well, it wasn't real appealing, I don't know how else to say it. The first thing I saw was the cover, and it was this battered blue cover that carried this compelling title United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Don't you just want to open that? Anyway, that court is located in Chicago and I'm going to try to explain what this is and I'm trying to keep it at a high level because I am not a legal expert. The United States Court of Appeals for well, the Seventh Circuit. Let's use this for an example. My understanding is that it's kind of like the middle manager in the federal judiciary hierarchy. Do you know how hard that is to say? Well, it's one rung above the trial courts known as the district courts and one below the top boss, the Supreme Court. So how this is significant for the Eastland adventure. Here is a court of appeals. They do a lot of different things, but what they do is they take another look at cases that have already been decided in federal district courts within their circuit. So the way it's been described to me, it's a second opinion on legal matters.

Natalie Zett:

Now, this particular document was the record of an Eastland related civil lawsuit filed in 1934, a full 19 years after the disaster took place. Whoa, that stopped me and I wondered if that was typical for something to drag on these many years. And I have to say, had I not looked at the cover closely, I would have probably downloaded it and put it in my Eastland Disaster Stuff folder. Don't you like my naming convention? Yep, eastland Disaster Stuff, that's where I put things. The plaintiff represented in the suit was the estate of William Risto R-I-S. Like Sam T, like Tom O-W Again, I will put that in the show notes. William was one of the passengers killed when the ship capsized. And now this is what happened to me and this is how.

Natalie Zett:

This is where some of the serendipity and supernatural perhaps comes into genealogy work. The name Risto, risto I'm not sure how they pronounced that Risto perhaps definitely rang a bell, because I've come across it a few times in my ancestry DNA matches. In other words, if you don't know what that is, if you do your DNA analysis, what Ancestry Kindly does this shows you all these other people who are related to you one way or the other. Some of them are very close relatives, they share DNA with you, and it's extra special when they have a family tree that's well built out and you can start checking for surnames. So this name popped up a few times and the people that I am related to with the Risto surname are related on the Pfeiffer side, my maternal grandmother's side. So that gives it even more of a possibility that I am somehow related to William Risto and I don't have conclusive evidence yet.

Natalie Zett:

But once again, I thought what I do when something like this hits me at the heart when I'm doing research is I've learned not to be flummoxed or thrown by this, as I was early on when I was having so many of these serendipitous coincidental experiences, I was just beside myself. I thought is this typical? And the answer is yes, but I didn't know that when I was just starting. So when I see a name that seems to speak to me, I'll ask them. In my mind I'll say something like William, nice to meet you. So what do you want me to do here?

Natalie Zett:

And in this case I was off to the races and I went down quite the rabbit hole investigating William Risto and his family. First of all, I couldn't find a comprehensive biography of William Risto online. That surprised me only because obviously I'm guessing his survivors or other people thought enough of what happened to keep pushing. Obviously, they did not feel that they received justice the first time around, so they kept going back and trying to make sure that justice might get served, whatever that looked like to them. And, as usual, when I can't find what I want online, sometimes I have to create it and don't wait around for somebody to do something when you're probably the someone that has to do it. That's how this thing starts.

Natalie Zett:

So I began to research William Risto. What I did was create a database for William Risto and then I began my usual search in various areas. The first place was Google Books to see if there was anything else available. Then the other thing was there's another site called Dead Fred. Most genealogists know Dead Fred as a place to try to find photographs, but if you're not acquainted with this site, it really is fascinating, and I was able to locate a number of photos for William Risto and his family on Dead Fred and it was just awesome to be able to see these people and I will share that information in the show notes.

Natalie Zett:

But just be aware that I also send out weekly newsletters where I talk about the podcast. But I also go beyond that and talk about the other things that are going on, either with the book or with the world building, or with genealogy, or writing in general, in more detail than I can go into the podcast with. So please subscribe if you want to see some of that and also if you want to see some of my attempts at AI, generative art. That's also a reason to subscribe. You never know, you might just get inspired to make some of your own artwork, ok, and so I did a lot of research and I wrote down my sources only because at this point for me, staying organized is such a challenge, because, once again, there's tentacles that reach out when you start doing things like that.

Natalie Zett:

So William had a brother also who was killed. His name was Herman, so both of the boys were on the ship and they both died when it capsized. But let me tell you a little bit about William. He was 30 years old, married with three young daughters, one of whom was just three months old when he died in the disaster. Actually, the story is in another publication that I located because he had that little baby, they didn't want to bring her on on the cruise so the mom stayed home with the baby and the other two little girls. So that's why she didn't go. And, as mentioned Williams, 25 year old brother Herman, who was engaged to be married, also died that day. William and Herman worked for Western Electric, as did most of the Eastland victims. Actually, my great aunt was one of the few who did not work for Western Electric and shortly after his death his wife moved back in with her parents for many years. I'm glad she had a place to go.

Natalie Zett:

I did a little checking on Williams' daughters and a couple of them got married and had children. One girl did not marry, did not have children. As far as I could tell, on that line there doesn't seem to be a lot of descendants. William and Herman had a sister and she did marry and had some children, but it's not a big family. However, I think there are other Risto relatives in that area that probably are related to them.

Natalie Zett:

William is buried in what was called Walltime or of Deutsch Walltime cemetery and it's now called Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, which is a suburb of Chicago, and here comes the interconnections. It's not terribly far from Bethania Cemetery in Justice, illinois, where my aunt and so many other family members are buried, and if you were listening last week, you know that it's also not very far from Resurrection Cemetery, which is sharing the same ground with Bethania Cemetery. Here's what happens when doing the world building for our people, the place that holds them, the cities or towns or villages in which they live. The places also have their DNA, their history, and so Forest Home Cemetery holds a lot more of Chicago's history, since it also has the Haymarket Martyrs Monument.

Natalie Zett:

Now, this monument is dedicated to the eight people who were tried after the Haymarket riot, sometimes called the Haymarket Massacre. As you can guess by the name, it was not a good thing. So if you've never heard of it, the Haymarket riot occurred in Chicago on May 4th 1886, and it stemmed from a peaceful rally supporting workers striking for an eight-hour workday. Tensions escalated when a bomb was thrown at the police, leading to the death of several officers and civilians in the ensuing chaos, and the aftermath saw those eight people that I just mentioned controversially tried and convicted, ultimately becoming a pivotal moment in US labor history. Yeah, and again. That was 1886. That was a few years before the Eastland disaster, but those who were young adults at that point probably heard of it, and certainly their parents would have heard of it and talked about it, and if they were of the working class, this would have even had more significance to them.

Natalie Zett:

What is interesting, though, at the base of the Haymarket Martyrs Monument is the statue of a woman, and this woman represents justice and she's holding a fallen worker. The words the day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today is inscribed on the base. This is an interesting turn of phrase. It could be interpreted many different ways, but the day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today. I sometimes can make a leap, when I read something like this, into the Eastland, the silence that surrounds the Eastland disaster. It still continues, and insofar as that it's not very well known. However, just because there's silence, that does not mean that there's not movement beneath the surface, as I found out in my life, even when I didn't know about this family or this disaster, it still ended up changing the course of my life and the choices that I made, so it's haunting to think about that, and again, for labor activists from around the world, this monument is a pilgrimage site, and so that sacred ground is holding a lot of history of two significant events. The Haymarket massacre victims, the Eastland disaster victims share the same space, and so I have not been there, but I think that might be next on my list of places to visit.

Natalie Zett:

Back to William Ristow's civil suit as I'm recording this, it's still unclear who filed this. I'm guessing it was his mother and perhaps his wife, but it also alluded to the fact that other victims' estates were part of this, and so I have to do a little bit more digging. And the one thing that I did notice is I was looking at the probate records of many of these victims of the Eastland disaster. Ironically, my aunt is not in there. I'm sharing this with you as I'm in the midst of research.

Natalie Zett:

This is the initial blush of research, right, I don't have all the answers yet, and I think a lot of times we do people a disservice when we present everything all clean and tidied up, because we don't represent what a mess it can be to do this type of thing, because I again, I jump right into the rabbit holes, I don't care, but I have to kind of leave, very much leave breadcrumbs in which I do, in the form of a database, because half the time I can't rely on my memory to tell me what I have done. But I can look at that database or that list of rows and columns and just say, oh yeah, I checked this resource already. Don't do it again. So I mentioned that again, just in case a database might help you or some other tool might help you. So experiment, although I love trying other people's approaches to see what works for me. Ultimately, some will work and some won't work, and I think the biggest challenge is to figure out what's the best way for you to work with the wiring you have and then, as always, challenge yourself to get more efficient or optimize your workflow, better things like that. So it's a constant back and forth.

Natalie Zett:

But back to the legal part of this discussion. I knew there were coroners in inquiries and investigations immediately after, but I did not realize that there was an ongoing lawsuit dragging through the courts for so many years, brought by the victims' families. And I don't know about you, but as I work on these types of histories, even something like this, a legal case, which I'm normally not drawn to, I end up developing an official affinity for all of the parties and I want to know more about them and I want to get more comfortable with doing this type of research. So that's one of the good things that happens through the course of ongoing learning. So again, I'm in mid research. I'll let you know if there's anything else that I find, but let me reiterate the main points of the things I have discovered.

Natalie Zett:

So, as you know, in 1915, the steamship Eastland capsized in the Chicago River, resulting in 844 passenger deaths. Now the company that owned the ship, the St Joseph Chicago Steamship Company, fileda lawsuit to limit its liability for the accident under maritime law. Seam law has provisions that ship owners can file to limit their total liability to the value of the ship. So the steamship company. What they were trying to do was to cap their liability at the value of the Eastland itself rather than pay the full damages. Does that make sense? I had to read that several times for it to make sense.

Natalie Zett:

So William Ristow's estate contested this limitation of liability and the case went through the lower courts first, and then a special commissioner found that the Eastland was seaworthy a hum um irony. And the capsizing was due to engineer error in handling the ballast tanks. Oh my goodness, if you know about the history of the Eastland, that thing was known as a cranky ship. There were many incidents before this happened. Some people were going across Lake Erie in this thing and I guess it became very unsteady and people were getting sick and they were afraid that it was going to tip over when they were in the midst of Lake Erie, which would have been a real problem. This thing was a time bomb and yet it passed federal inspection. So the commissioner said that the engineer negligence was without the knowledge of the steamship company, so it could limit its liability.

Natalie Zett:

I know you always think that doing a court case is going to equal justice and sadly it doesn't always happen that way. So the district court agreed with the commissioner and Ristosa State appealed the case to the appeals court, arguing several points. The appeals court affirmed the lower court's decision, finding the limitation law applied, the ship was seaworthy and the district court's fact findings were supported. I'm reading the summary of this document. I'm not agreeing with it. Okay, in plain terms, the appeals court ruled in favor of the steamship company, agreeing that it could limit its liability under maritime law and was not fully responsible for the accident.

Natalie Zett:

So, anyway, did the families receive justice? Rhetorical question. It doesn't seem that way and if you've made it through the podcast this far, you're wondering well, why the heck should I care about something that happened to people so long ago with which I have no connection? If nothing else, history repeats itself. So when you see this thing that, think of it as a template and go forward in your own life or in more recent history, have you seen this type of template play out in other events, big events in history? I'll leave that up to you.

Natalie Zett:

There was another discovery. There was a much longer tribute to the Risto brothers in a magazine called the Forest Leaves. In fact, the entire issue was devoted to the Eastland disaster and there's not too much available about this publication. But Forest Leaves, which I think is out of River Forest, illinois, was published from the early 1900s to 1924. And it was probably one of those local or specialized publications that sprang up during the boom of print media in the late 19th and early 20th century. Certainly there's so many exciting publications that they were born. They didn't last very long, but they captured quite a bit of history, the nature of its publishers, hall Heilman Company, aren't readily available yet in widely accessible historical records and databases up to this update. Again, I'm in the midst of research, so stay tuned. I'll probably have some more, and what I generally do is add to my blog posts when I discover things. So I'm going to read from Forest Leaves this lovely tribute to the Risto brothers.

Natalie Zett:

William F and Herman A are among the victims of the Eastland. William F Risto of 939 Lathrop Avenue, forest Park, and Herman A Risto Jr of Oak Park, sons of Mr and Mrs Herman A Risto of 1041 Home Avenue, were among the employees of the Western Electric Company who lost their lives in the Eastland disaster of last Saturday. William Leaves a wife who before marriage was Miss Anna Riemann or Riemer, with three little girls Eleanor, age three and a half years old, louise, age two years old, and Lillian, age three months. But for the baby his family would probably have been with him on the boat. Herman was unmarried and lived at home. He had as a companion for the day Miss Ida Jatzi of 5219 South Campbell Avenue, chicago, but the announcement of their engagement was expected soon with the party where Miss Jatzi's brother, oscar, who succeeded in saving her and several other Chicago young people, including Albert Imel who, with the Ristows, was drowned. The party were on the first deck of the riverside of the boat and were all thrown into the water together. So the bodies were not identified until nearly midnight Saturday when forest park friends found them in the improvised morgue at the armory. A double funeral was held at the Risto home on Tuesday afternoon at 3 o'clock, conducted by Reverend Mr it looks like the name is Horning pastor of the German Lutheran Church on Ashland Avenue in the city. As an aside, this appears to be Immanuel Lutheran Church present day and still located on Ashland Avenue. Back to reading. The interment was at wall time and again. That's today's Forest Home Cemetery.

Natalie Zett:

William was a member of the Circle Masonic Lodge, herman of Thomas J Turner Masonic Lodge, of Atlas Lodge and the series that's C-E-R-E-S Lodge of the Rebecca. The Odd Fellows and Rebecca's were represented in the rites at the house and the Masonic bodies held their ritual at the cemetery. The floral tributes were many and beautiful. William would have been 30 years old at least that's what it looks like it says in October and Herman 26 in November. Their parents, mr and Mrs Herman, a Risto, the only surviving member of the family. Miss Matilda Risto and Mrs William Risto wish, through forest leaves, to express their gratitude to the lodges and to their neighbors and friends for the acts of kindness and sympathy that have been so many in their great sorrow.

Natalie Zett:

This is the end of the article in Forest Leaves, which was published soon after the Eastland Disaster in July 1915. What's interesting about this, and another rabbit hole to jump into, is the history of the Masonic Lodges in Chicago. These lodges really were important and really supported their members and their members' families, and so, of course, I've added the history of lodges to that big old database that I have as I'm investigating William Risto's history. When we engage in building the world of our ancestors or our relatives, it definitely creates a confusing dynamic sometimes, and part of it is just learning to be confused and hanging in there with it, trusting that it will sort itself out eventually. My oh my. This has been quite the history lesson for me anyway. So the Eastland Disaster echoes keep rippling out so many years later. In things such as these forgotten civil cases, it does serve as a reminder how a tragedy can endure for generations of family members who are forever impacted. Again, I will testify to that.

Natalie Zett:

But from this point onward, I'm going to start looking at other victims and people associated with the Eastland Disaster, just to see if there's any information available, and if there is, I'll certainly share it here and I will blog about it, and I already started making tributes on my website to these people that might not have a lot of their history shared with the public.

Natalie Zett:

I wanted to be out there, so I will do the best I can, and please feel free to let me know if you know anything. For now, take care and have a good week, and I will talk to you next week.

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Natalie Zett

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