Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

The Rosetta Stone of the Eastland Disaster

• Natalie Zett • Season 4 • Episode 140

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Tracing the Eastland story back to the people who first preserved it online.

This week, I’m pulling back the curtain on how, in the late 1990s, the Eastland Disaster story was rediscovered, shaped, reshaped, and carried onto the early Internet (courtesy of the Eastland Memorial Society). But when that original website vanished, some of its content — including family-written stories and volunteer research — resurfaced in later retellings without the names of the people who first contributed them.

In other words, the attribution was MIA.

And I’ll share how the record can be rebuilt using clear sources, solid attribution, and a commitment to course-correction whenever new evidence turns up — those moments where the archive gently reminds you, “There’s more to the story.”

The guideposts are stubbornly simple:

  • Cite your sources
  • Credit those who did the work
  • Welcome contradiction.
  • Keep the file open for new research — even if it means letting go of a cherished assumption (or two!).

In this episode, I spotlight the Eastland Memorial Society — the under-credited early web project that built timelines, tracked permissions, preserved photographs, saved media coverage, and offered essential context back when the internet was barely out of diapers. Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, those pages now act as a genuine research Rosetta Stone.

Resources:

Natalie Zett:

Hello, I'm Natalie Zett, and welcome to Flower in the River. This podcast, inspired by my book of the same name, explores the 1915 Eastland disaster in Chicago and its enduring impact, particularly on my family's history. We'll explore the intertwining narratives of others impacted by this tragedy as well. And we'll dive into writing and genealogy and uncover the surprising supernatural elements that surface in family history research. Come along with me on this journey of discovery. Hey, this is Natalie, and welcome to Flower in the River, episode 140. And I hope you're doing well. And thank you for all the kind comments. So glad that people enjoyed the stories of the telephone operators, many of whom became the Hello Girls of World War I, which we featured last week. But this week we are returning to the historiography of the Eastland disaster. This is a key part of the academic work and academic writing I'm doing. Historiography is simply the study of how history gets written or rewritten, and by whom? What's remembered, what's left out, and whose version becomes quote unquote official simply by repetition, and may or may not reflect what actually happened. And it's November 2025 as I'm doing this, and I was recalling November 2023 when I started to take the podcast in a different direction and expanded it beyond my family. I can tell you one of the reasons why I did that. I was troubled by the fact that when you go searching online and look at any stories about the Eastland disaster, they have become an echo chamber of sorts where the same stories are repeated again and again. Why that is, I don't know. But I do know that there are over 800 some people whose stories need to be told. And also I didn't want my family to be part of any echo chamber because they are not stand-ins for everybody else. Besides, I'm a genealogist, and you know that you're not the only show when it comes to something like this. When the Eastland disaster happened, there were detailed biographical accounts of the people involved. And I'm talking survivors, victims, rescuers, journalists, all kinds of people, that were printed in newspapers not just in Chicago, but across the United States and actually across the world. As time passed, that information somehow didn't carry forward. It's puzzling because most of it is still right there in public archives, easy to find, very easily accessible. Now here's the odd thing. Right now you can go to sites like Find a Grave, and that's a crowdsourced site, so there are challenges with that as well. Or you can go to familysearch.org and you can also look at various bloggers such as posts in the graveyard. And you can certainly go to my website and find a lot of information. But none of us are official websites devoted to the Eastland disaster. And that's the thing. So it's independent researchers, bloggers, crowdsourced places like Find a Grave that have the information. That contrasts with various Eastland sites that a lot of times have bare minimum when it comes to biographies. But that's not due to lack of information. Even the period between, say, 1916 to about the 1990s, this thing called the World Wide Web, which became the internet, that became a thing. There were people who were interested in the Eastland, but they also saw a new way where they could easily share this information with a lot of people. They started to leverage this tool, which meant the story could go to the world. There were no restrictions. There was no gatekeeping. And I want to continue talking about these early endeavors because they are so important to our understanding of the Eastland. One organization that is almost never credited in these modern retellings of the Eastland Disaster History is that of the Eastland Memorial Society. Had I not known those people, had I not been involved also early on with Eastland disaster research, I probably wouldn't know about them either. However, this is one of those synchronicity things because around that same time, and we're talking the late 1990s, was when I first learned about my family's connection to the Eastland disaster. I didn't even know there was this family member, let alone know that there was this thing called the Eastland disaster. And in 1998 or thereabouts, I was just trying to put the pieces together and was corresponding with a woman called Mary Bonneville who had an early version of a website devoted to the Eastland disaster. And this eventually became the Eastland Memorial Society website. But she was already doing exemplary work, and she really helped me early on with understanding what happened with my family and what happened throughout the course of this thing called the Eastland disaster. So when I look back, and that was so many years ago now, I am really grateful that I actually knew some of these people, that I was actually there kind of at the dawn of all this going on. I didn't know that someday this information would be erased from the history of what we might think that we know about the Eastland disaster today. That early website is so important for so many reasons that I have been in the process of trying to restore the pieces that I find to my website. And in the course of adding that and everything else to my own website, well, I've outgrown my current website. It's funny now, but I'm in the midst of doing a migration from my current platform into another platform that can handle all of this information. But this seems the good and right and most responsible thing to do. And that would be courtesy of the Internet Archives Wayback Machine, where they catalog, among other things, older website pages. And this Eastland Memorial Society website is still remarkable and it still holds up. In many ways, it's more complete than anything else we have today that pertains to the Eastland disaster, and I'll explain why. What you have to do is put bits and pieces together, and it's not dissimilar from the ancient text studies I used to do in graduate school. It actually is really interesting to look at text from different eras. The big challenge when you're looking at any type of history, whether ancient or modern, is that not all the sources agree with each other. And the way to deal with that is to learn how to deal with contradiction, learn how to deal with nuance. And you also can't say that this is it. You can't gatekeep, you can't close the door on this research. You have to always leave it open for new discoveries. That's what a responsible historian, a responsible genealogist, and a responsible independent researcher does. People like George Hilton will say, look, this is what I know at this time, but I invite other people to weigh in. So locating these particular pages from the Eastland Memorial Society, they act as a Rosetta Stone. They helped me translate all the rest of what was going on early on during that period. These pages provide a template for how to engage the past with the present, and vice versa. They, of course, cited their sources. They let you know who authored an article, where they got the information from, and they did the same for photos. I took for granted that anyone would do this with history, but as we've learned, not everyone does this. So let's explore these pages and hopefully you'll see what I'm talking about and understand better why they are so valuable. Here we go. We're going into the time machine. We're going back to the late 90s, early 2000s. So I'm going to share the information from this page. The page title is Reverence, Reflection and Respect. The Eastland Memorial Society was founded in September 1998 by Mary Bonneville and Carl Sub. Mary is an avid Eastland historian with a strong will to build and to further public awareness and recognition. Carl is the grandson of two Eastland passengers, and so with a solid background of historical reverence, personal reflection, and ancestral respect, the society was born. The projects already discussed as undertaking include, but are not limited to convincing the U.S. Postal Service to issue a commemorative stamp, erecting a prominent and appropriate memorial at the disaster site, planning the one hundredth anniversary activities, establishing an information archive, compiling descendants' recollections of oral histories, maintaining the society website, increasing historical recognition of the disaster through print and mass media. Those individuals who are interested in joining and participating in the Eastland Memorial Society are encouraged to register. So that concludes this page or this section, but right out the gate, you get the vibe that they want to include everybody, and they are trying to build a community around the Eastland disaster. And they also share their values: historical reverence, personal reflection, and ancestral respect. If you remember, a couple of weeks ago I shared one of the biographies that was on their website of Ella Schlentz, and her niece, Colleen Wrengel, wrote the article. It was a lovely article. Again, they did everything right, title, author's name, photo provenance, all the rest, beautiful story. But by the time it made it to 2025, the authorship is gone and the narrative is flattened. I wish I could say that was an uncommon occurrence, but unfortunately that's not the case. In fact, when I was looking at the list, the only list actually that has any kind of source attribution of fatalities, and that would be George Hilton's list, only about 18 to 20 percent of the people listed there have biographies, and these biographies are spread out all over the place. Some are very well done, others are very bare bones. But we will continue in our journey through the Wayback Machine and the Eastland Memorial Society. And now I want to transition to another page. I call this my Rosetta Stone page. You'll see why. When I saw what the Eastland Memorial Society did, it's a timeline. But what it does is it tells you the history of the organization from its beginning until its maturity. It doesn't really tell us when it ended, but it gives us a huge, huge through line. And also it increases trust because it's very transparent as to what happened, what they did, decisions made, etc. I've never seen anything like it, and I need to do something similar. What I did was I recreated sections of their website on my website so you can look at what they've done. It's easier to see something like this. And let's go through the timeline now, and you'll see how invaluable something like this is. It really is good practice for any individual, not to mention organization, to include its own timeline, not just to show when things happened, but to be transparent about its own evolution. A clear timeline also gives credit to those who came before and to the people who contributed along the way. It's an act of accountability. And gratitude, I'd say, and it builds trust with anyone visiting the site. After two years of working on the people of the Eastland in terms of their biographies, in terms of locating all these people that went under the radar, when I research someone connected to the Eastland disaster and come across a biography or a piece of writing with no source citations, no provenance, I cannot use it as it is. Doing so would risk plagiarizing something that may have already been copied from elsewhere. Instead, what I do is this I treat it as a lead, a clue, and then I try to trace the information back to its primary source before including it in my work. If I can't locate it, I just don't use it. So from the Eastland Memorial Society website, here is their timeline in their own words. On May 19th, 1998, Mary Bonneville and Carl Sup first discuss the merits of creating an Eastland organization. September first, nineteen ninety-eight, the Eastland Memorial Society begins. November second, nineteen ninety-eight, they begin work on the website. December second, nineteen ninety eight, George W. Hilton joins the Eastland Memorial Society. You know George, right? So it says Professor Emeritus George W. Hilton, author of Eastland Legacy of the Titanic, met with co-founder, Mary Bonneville, on December 2nd, 1998 in Michigan. We are pleased to have his support and in-depth knowledge of this event in our membership. Welcome. Here's my commentary. That is the dream team. George Hilton, author of Eastland Legacy of the Titanic, and still to date, the definitive book about the Eastland disaster, he trusted these two people, particularly Mary Bonneville, to support and perhaps carry on his work. December 15th, 1999. The Society Constitution is drafted and approved. Again, they are completely transparent. They're telling you what they're about, what they're going to do. January 1st, 1999. The website goes online. The response is very encouraging. February 8th, 1999, the website wins the Anthrotech Site of the Week Award. I'm not sure what that is, but it sounds like a big deal. May 3rd, 1999. The Eastland Memorial Projects are defined. June 4th, 1999. The website wins the Study Web Academic Excellence Award. June 24, 1999, the Eastland Memorial Society commissions artist Warren Turek to create a series of six Eastland prints. July 24th, 1999, the 84th anniversary of the disaster. The new website is unveiled with more than double the previous contents. All future additions to content will be logged here. Now this next one is significant because on September 1st, 1999, they added the Arizona Republican News Articles from July 25th through July 31st, 1915. Why is this significant? Back in 1999, the online newspaper world that we take for granted now did not exist. Google News Archive, what did we do back then? That was still years away. Google itself was barely a year old. Can you believe that? I can't believe it. So genealogy and history buffs in the late 1990s were using printed indexes, local library microfilm readers, ah, the good old days, and ordering copies through interlibrary loan. When the Eastland Memorial Society started uploading newspapers, this was not a common thing. They were actually ahead of their time. September 10th, 1999, additional information and pages added to the Chicago River Gallery. Be sure to read about the history of the Chicago River. If you click on this link, it should open a page that has several images, some of which are quite lovely. I'll leave a link to that in the show notes as well. September 27, 1999. President and co-founder Carl Sup met with a photographer of the Chicago Sun Times to contribute to an upcoming article to be written by Andrew Herman, the Sunday News Editor of the Sun Times. Carl was phone interviewed previously by Mr. Herman. October 4th, 1999, the Eastland Memorial Society forges a relationship with the Eastland Disaster Museum in Wheaton, Illinois, and the Chicago Maritime Society. We look forward to years of a wonderful partnership with these tremendous organizations. The Eastland Disaster Museum in Wheaton was Dave Nelson's project. Dave was the grandson of Elmer Nelson, who was an ironworker who happened to be working near the dock when the Eastland capsized, and he and fellow iron workers were summoned to help out and start blasting into the side of the ship to rescue people. I think that Elmer Nelson received commendation from Coroner Hoffman as well. I've met Dave several times, and I even went to his museum. His museum wasn't in Wheaton then, it was actually in downtown Chicago. That's one of those that got absorbed into another museum, and also the history of this one needs to be pursued as well. October 7th, 1999, the Eastland Disaster Article runs in the Chicago Sun Times. Permission is granted by Mr. Herman to reprint the article on our website. I have to pause and comment here. This is what's so wonderful about this website. I can look at what's left of it on the Wayback Machine. And because they documented everything so well, they cited their sources, they told you where they got the information from. I can reconstruct it. I can go down their research paths and see what they saw, and also add to it. This is marvelous. They gave a gift to the future. And that's what we as researchers need to think about as well. It's not just for us to hold on to, right? In summary, they did everything right as far as I can tell, and I'm grateful to them. They were about doing the work. They were about building the foundation. That's why I have such respect for this site because it's really helping me as well. October 22nd, 1999. A southern Minnesota high school librarian, Bonnie Adams, contributes the Eastland poem written by Carl Sandberg. Be sure to read the newly added Carl Sandberg Biography and Poetry. Now here's another one that's fascinating. October 31st, 1999. Per request, the story of the Iroquois theater fire is presented. The worst loss of life in a Chicago fire claimed 602 victims in 1903. If further information is required, please write. October 10th, 1999, added a gallery of images from the Iroquois Theater Fire. It is remarkable to see the similarities between these two tragedies. Pause for a second. Here's the thing. As far as I can tell, this has never been acknowledged in recent years, but this is where this partnership or pairing comes from. Since then we have seen this, but they're kept kind of separate. November 11th, 1999, added an article from the State Journal Register in Springfield, Illinois. My thanks to Doug Pakorsky and his editor for permission to reprint this article, which lends insight into the impact of the disaster on other cities. What I so appreciate about them and what makes it easy for me now to research this is that, of course, they gave source citation, but they also noted that they asked for permission and they got it. They didn't take the article and rework it and flatten it. They presented the article as it was. November 14, 1999, added comprehensive website search capabilities. Try it out. Search capabilities were very new in 1999. This is an interesting history too of the web. I was around during that time doing website development as well, and it was so exciting trying to figure out how to make everything work. Okay, November 15, 1999. The history of Western Electric is added to the website. Many people have asked questions regarding Western Electric, and hopefully we've answered all of them. December 12th, 1999. On this Sunday, the site of the Eastland disaster was examined by members of the Underwater Archaeological Society of Chicago, led by Tim Wolseley and Sam Frank. Although spirits were high, no artifacts related to the Eastland were recovered. I want to thank everyone who stopped by to visit. All of you were the real treasure that day. January 14th, 2000. Added a letter from the Eastland Disaster Museum explaining their origin, motives, and generosity. I encourage everyone to view this incredible collection. Also January fourteenth, 2000, added the July twenty fourth, nineteen fifteen edition of the Dubuque Telegraph Herald. Of additional interest is a list of other steamship disasters from eighteen ninety to nineteen fifteen. Co-founder and president Carl Sub will be visiting the current Titanic exhibit on display in Toronto, Canada before it moves to Chicago, after it closes in Toronto on February 10th. Look for more details soon. February 18th, 2000, the Titanic exhibit with its Chicago Connections section featuring the Eastland will open to the public at the Museum of Science and Industry. Now that's the end of this timeline, and I've shared the highlights with you. That event at the Museum of Science and Industry that they mentioned. That is the very event I attended. I did meet Mary there in person finally. I met a Lot of people there. But in modern or more recent retellings of this event, there's no mention of this organization, by the way, that I could locate. So I'm really grateful that I was able to at least get some of their website back. And I will keep adding it to my website so you can look at it. And there's one more section of their website that I want to share with you for this episode. I'm going to share a page called Resources from the Eastland Memorial Society's website. The following sources may help those who wish to continue researching the Eastland disaster. Then again, they may not for the simple reason that they disagree on so many important facts. Where one source claims that the Eastland fell on its starboard side, others tell of the ship falling on its port side. Sources vary on the time the Eastland actually rolled, anywhere from 720 to 730. There are variances in the spelling of names of the ship's officers. Different sources also list completely different ships as those which were to take part in the Western Electric Excursion that day. Death toll statistics range from 835 to 844. There may be even more discrepancies yet to be discovered. In any case, researching the Eastland disaster is no easy task. Regardless, any source will provide slightly different accounts and perspectives, and some relate eyewitness testimonials that cannot be found in other sources. Below is a list of recommended sources. There may be other resources, but these are the most comprehensive encountered to date. So that's the end of that introduction passage to this page, and the page is called Resources. The first one is George Hilton's book, Eastland Legacy of the Titanic. And listen to this commentary that Mary wrote, quote, to call this book thorough and detailed would be a great understatement. Hilton's book is so thoroughly researched that readers will be inundated with more details about the Eastland than they will ever remember or care about. However, I believe this source to be the most accurate, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to develop a strong sense of the ship's history. While the naval technical jargon is difficult to understand at times, it is not insurmountable to a tenacious reader. The most notable characteristic of this book, other than the photographs of the ship before, during, and after the disaster, is a list of the names, ages, and occupations of the victims, end quote. So there's a little bit of humor in that, and I definitely understand what she's talking about there because I too found that book overwhelming. But here's the thing, I had to grow into that book. And these many years later, here are some of the gifts from this book. Hilton's list, which the Eastland Memorial Society repurposed and put on their website, is the only source cited list of Eastland disaster victims that I have ever been able to find. I've seen spreadsheets, but there's no source citations. Once again, the pattern of no source citations. The thing is, where did you get this information from? You weren't born knowing it. And that remains a challenge and sticking point when doing this type of research. George Hilton was a scholar, he was a historian. He didn't do this with an agenda in mind. He didn't do this with the thought of creating marketing or branding out of this. He wanted to do the history. He also welcomed new life, new information into his research. The next resource is a video, and I've seen this video. It is available on Guess Where, the Internet Archive. It's called the Eastland Disaster, and it was produced by Southport Video of Kenosha, Wisconsin in 1999. This is a wonderful piece of history. Here is what was written about this. Quote, Southport Video has produced a 55-minute documentary about the Eastland disaster. It is titled The Eastland Disaster, and it covers the background of the vessel, information on the actual disaster, and the story of the ship following its salvage and restoration. The film shows many different pictures of the ship, the disaster scene, and the individuals involved. Most notably, the video features testimonials from several people who have researched the Eastland extensively, including Dr. George Hilton, author of Eastland Legacy of the Titanic. What Mary Bonneville didn't mention is that she too is in this video. You can only find this video on the Internet Archive, by the way. I've not been able to find it on YouTube, which is a curious thing too. Why was this not carried forward and promoted as part of the historiography of the Eastland disaster? I have it on my website, and I'll try to figure out if I can post it on YouTube without running into copyright issues. I never want to do that. And then they list several books that contain chapters on the Eastland. The first one is by Dana T. Bowen, and it is called Lore of the Lakes, and it was published in 1940. And the next one is one that I also found on my own, but now we're dovetailing here. And it is Dwight Boyer's True Tales of the Great Lakes, published in 1971. George Hilton cited this as a resource, but I haven't seen anybody since who has done that. It might be there, but I just haven't run into it. Another one, Pete Caesar or Caesar, Lake Michigan Wreck, published in 1979 by the Great Lakes Marine Research. She writes, This source contains most of the major discrepancies. Either the author had access to information that no writer has, or he was just really confused. The reliability of this source is in doubt. That's hilarious, by the way, but I have to get this book just to see what she's talking about. Finally, we have William Radigan, Great Lakes Shipwrecks and Survivals, published by William B. Erdman's Publishing Company, 1977. And there's no description for that, but she leaves us with some sage wisdom that was completely appropriate for that time period. Quote, visiting your local library to check out microfilm of newspaper articles from the week following, July 24th, 1915, can be fruitful, especially if you live in the vicinity of the Great Lakes. End quote. And they're not smoothing it out, they're not turning it into a slick product. They're just saying, this is what we have. We hope others will join us. We want to be of assistance and support to you if you are doing this type of research, but we don't have all the answers. They're not anointing themselves as the authorities or the experts. They're just fellow travelers through this history. In the two years that I have done very deep research into the history of the people of the Eastland disaster, in a lot of ways it almost feels as if I'm starting over at square one because of the removal of so much provenance, source citation, and don't forget the death toll, which was always an estimate, by the way. When a death toll like this gets frozen in place and then turned into, I don't know, marketing, branding, or advertising, instead of an invitation to scholarship or continuing research, that too has sidelined the research of the history of the Eastland disaster. Now, in the last couple of months, I already found documentation for an additional person, Thomas Marin, in the Library of Congress Archives. This is someone that George Hilton inadvertently left out of his original death toll estimate. And to his scholarly credit, George Hilton himself said this number wasn't final, and he encouraged other researchers to keep doing their thing and add to the record he knew more information would come to the light as time went by. And in addition, I've also identified two more people who died years later from illnesses they developed after being rescued from the Chicago River on the day of the Eastland disaster. Well, this episode needed to be produced because this finding is so incredible, but I realize that it may not be of great interest to most people, but for genealogists, researchers, historians, this is a chance to look under the hood because I do want you to see what I'm seeing. And I'm much more in alignment with the way that the folks of the Eastland Memorial Society approach their work. I want it to be transparent. I want to tell you about the frustrations I run into. However, remember there's always good news. And even if something is erased, I just finished actually a course on the history of Stalin. And Stalin was one of the original people who was really good at rewriting history, including airbrushing photos. If he didn't like somebody, they disappeared from the original photo. This is fascinating, by the way. Here we think we're so modern with our AI and all the things we can do. The precedent was set a while ago. And the other bit of inspiration comes from author and scholar and genealogist Hank Jones. He has said many, many times, when you're in pursuit of your ancestors, and we can widen what ancestors mean in this case, remember they are waiting to be found. They want to be found. I would have to say, after all these years of research, searching my own family members and now searching the people of the Eastland disaster, what Hank Jones said is true. They're waiting to be found. They don't make it easy to be found, but there's always something that you can grab onto that opens their world up. So I take heart in that as I do this research. Yes, I wish it had been handled differently, but you know what? I can do nothing about that. The only thing I can do is try to do it the way that makes sense, that is the most ethical, and the way that follows the tradition of those who have gone before me, and that would be George Hilton. That would be the folks of the Eastland Memorial Society. The template's there, we just have to follow it. And we will continue following it because there's so many more exciting, fascinating, compelling stories, and we'll tell them. Take care. Have a great week, and I will talk to you next week. Hey, that's it for this episode, and thanks for coming along for the ride. Please subscribe or follow so you can keep up with all the episodes. And for more information, please go to my website. That's www.flowerinthher.com. I hope you'll consider buying my book available as audiobook, ebook, paperback, and hardcover because I still owe people money, and that's my running joke. But the one thing I'm serious about is that this podcast and my book are dedicated to the memory of all who experienced the Eastland disaster of nineteen fifteen. Goodbye for now.

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Natalie Zett

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