Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Rescuers in the Shadows: A Milestone, a Mystery Photo, and the Brothers Petroskey

• Natalie Zett • Season 4 • Episode 156

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This week, we pull back the curtain on the Eastland disaster’s historiography and bring two overlooked rescuers to the forefront: Great Lakes captains Walter and Emil Petroskey. The Petroskey brothers manned a lifeboat and saved lives when the steamer rolled in the Chicago River in 1915. Along the way, we share how a podcast milestone—7,500 downloads—became fuel to double down on careful genealogy, source citations, and the investigative steps that turn rumor into record.

We walk through real research problems and the tools that solve them. A listener’s request led us to an Eastland victim’s profile with a vague citation and a photo with no clear source. Reverse image search returned multiple identities, none of which were correct. That detour becomes a masterclass in method: grounding claims in primary sources, reading obituaries and shipping registers closely, and using the genealogical proof standard to weigh evidence quality. 

For Eastland Disaster research, we return to the foundations laid long ago by George Hilton and the former Eastland Memorial Society. We explain why lists without notes can mislead, and show how independent researchers can rebuild trust by linking every assertion to its document.

The Petroskey brothers’ story unfolds through contemporary newspapers, Coast Guard connections, and Great Lakes context—Kewaunee’s harbor culture, hard-won master’s licenses, and the industrial routes that tied Manistee, Milwaukee, and Chicago. Their rescue medals and long service should be part of every Eastland narrative, yet modern summaries never mention them. Restoring their place shows what happens when we move past recycled anecdotes and center on verifiable names, dates, ships, and places.

If you’re tracing history or your own family line, you’ll find practical takeaways: how to evaluate unsourced claims, capture citations that travel, and use short-form video to share findings with a global audience. We close with an open door to Eastland families who need genealogical assistance and a nod to RootsTech for anyone eager to sharpen their research skills. 

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Welcome And Global Listeners

Natalie Zett

Hello, I'm Natalie Zett, and welcome to Flower in the River. This podcast, inspired by my book of the same name, explores the 1915 Eastland disaster in Chicago and its enduring impact, particularly on my family's history. We'll explore the intertwining narratives of others impacted by this tragedy as well. And we'll dive into writing and genealogy and uncover the surprising supernatural elements that surface in family history research. Come along with me on this journey of discovery. Well, hey, this is Natalie, and welcome to episode 156 of Flower in the River Podcast. And I hope you're doing well. So I was looking at my statistics and I see, at least for the last 10 episodes, most of the listeners actually are not from the United States. They're from all over the globe. I can't even guess why that is true, but I want to say I'm so glad you're here, because this is near and dear to my heart. I keep in regular contact with my own family members from places like Slovakia, Poland, Germany, and even Georgia, the country Georgia, not the state Georgia. So I love it when I see that there are also listeners from these various regions. Please know that I appreciate you. I'm glad you're here. And for all listeners wherever you are located, whether just down the street or on the other side of the globe. So this week, I am opening with some good news. Because I don't know about you, but I need some good news. I think actually we all do. Last week I got a notification from BuzzSprout. That's the platform that I use to distribute this show. And they let me know that this podcast has reached 7,500 downloads. Now, in terms of stats, numbers actually don't interest me except when they're incorrect. Of course, I'm referring to the unsubstantiated casualty number on the Eastland that's been bandied about for so long. But back to the 7,500 downloads. That stopped me cold. When I first launched this podcast in 2023, it was basically to answer questions that I was getting about my book, Flower in the River. I just released it and people were interested in the backstory, and I was on a number of podcasts and radio shows such as Coast to Coast. After I finished doing the audio book, I thought maybe it's time to end the podcast. But I didn't end the podcast. Something said keep going, although I didn't think there'd be that much interest in this level of historical minutiae. Thankfully I was wrong. Since I've been doing this podcast, a lot of you have let me know something that I didn't quite expect either. Although most of you are interested in genealogy and history, a lot of you are even more interested in the investigative process that I go through as I do the research and deliver this information to you each week. I didn't expect that either. I guess you can say I'm a little too close to the material sometimes, but so be it. And this is how the investigative part of my work happened. Once I started branching out beyond my own family's experience of the Eastland disaster, I had a feeling there was more to uncover. During this deeper level investigation where I really stood back and wanted to get a grasp on the landscape of this historiography, I noticed that certain platforms did this. They kept telling the same Eastland stories over and over again, and honestly, that was a head scratcher because I thought, good lord, there are over 800 some people who died on this thing, not to mention the other people who were affected by it. Where are the rest of the stories? I mean, is it not the purpose of certain platforms to tell the entire history of this event? That's what I thought. Well, this has not been the case, at least until recently when I started doing my podcast, and others in tandem started doing things like filling in biographies on Find a Grave, starting their own blogs or websites that in part or in total are devoted to the Eastland disaster. That's when things started to change. So just a few years ago. However, the Eastland Disaster history had a really good start in the middle of the 1990s with George Hilton's book, and that research continued in the late 1990s, early 2000s with the Eastland Memorial Society's work, not just their website, but the content on their website. They, of course, are no longer an entity, but their work lives on thanks to the Internet Archive. So fast forward, I publish my book, Something Says to Me, stick with this podcast, and you need to expand it beyond your family because there's so much missing. So many more stories and biographies that have to be told. I went with my intuition and the evidence has backed it up. Here are some of the patterns that began to emerge as I got deep into this research. First of all, the historiography of the Eastland disaster. Historiography is a term that just refers to how the history of an event is told. In other words, the history of the history. In the twenty first century, there have been some interesting things that have happened. For example, did you know there's no source-cited peer-reviewed list of Eastland victims or of others connected to the disaster? No. There are lists that appear here and there. But with a couple of exceptions, there's no indication as to where these lists come from. I know of a few sources, the Cook County Coroner's Report that was assembled after the Eastland disaster, and of course, George Hilton's detailed list that he put in his book in Appendix D, Eastland Legacy of the Titanic. Tilton annotated it and had the sources available for people to continue the research. But Hilton was a historian and a scholar, not a gatekeeper, and he was very clear that this was his initial findings, and he wanted that work to continue. And during that time period, George Hilton was working with the folks from the Eastland Memorial Society, and they took his information with his permission, put it into a table format, and put it on their website. That website is still available on the Internet Archive, even though the organization no longer exists. And I also took their table with proper attribution and put it on my website so you can see it there as well. They all demonstrated best practices in genealogy and history. But after that organization disbanded, the research, the scholarly approach, the best practices, that didn't seem to continue with the same focus and rigor. In many of the modern retellings, and I'm talking about the mid-21st century here, there are a lot of missing footnotes and source citations. When basic source citations are missing, that makes it really challenging to verify the information that you're seeing. How do you know it's true? Now, fortunately, I have been able to track down many or most of the original sources or the primary sources for those stories that are missing this crucial information. But it does take a lot more time to locate this information, and it makes research challenging, let's say it that way. But after nearly three years of seeing this pattern repeat over and over again, I have no problem calling it out, but the way to call something like this out is to do the research. Gather the sources, gather the evidence, and document every detail within an inch of its life. Nothing more, nothing less. And fortunately, you don't have to recreate the wheel because there are so many wonderful templates and models that are available that are created by genealogists and historians. The best practices are out there, but they actually have to be used. I really should call this the Adventures in Problem Solving because that's much of what this has been about. And before I go on, I want to insert a public service announcement. If you are an Eastland family member, reach out to me if you're having difficulty getting information about your person. I will be glad to help. No guarantees, but the cost is free. Glad to help you. And if you want to get in touch with me, you can certainly do that via my website. And I'm also on most of the social platforms: Instagram, Substack, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads, Medium, and Blue Sky. Whew! I think I have them all covered. Oh no, I forgot one. YouTube. How could I forget that one? And I especially encourage you to subscribe to one of those because each week I create 90-second videos that summarize that week's podcast and story. The reason for that is simple. Sometimes it's a lot easier and a lot more fun to watch a 90-second video than it is to sit down with a longer podcast. Of course, that's up to you, but it really is an effective storytelling format. And I have to say those 90-second videos are one of the reasons that the stories of the people involved in the Eastland disaster have reached so many audiences all over the world. That's another way to access the information. Now that's the end of this public service announcement onward. So a couple of weeks ago, I responded to a request for some assistance from another Eastland disaster family member. This person sent me a link to a profile and wanted me to evaluate it and to see if there was additional information about this person. I did a quick look at this online profile and let me tell you what I found. The issues that I saw were issues that I've seen repeatedly. However, this one had some twists and turns to it. This profile actually had a source citation. And at first I thought, great, because I don't see that very often when I go searching online for Eastland history. Well, hold on. The source citation was vague at best, and there was no active link, so I couldn't even locate the newspaper from which this profile allegedly was based. So that was one problem. And when I searched, nearly everywhere that I know to search online for this newspaper, including Google Books, including Chronicling America, Illinois Digital Archives, and similar sites, I couldn't locate this newspaper. It's not to say that it's not out there, but I could not locate it. So that was the other issue. Then as I was examining this profile, I found it very puzzling. There was indeed a biography, but this biography was very high level. Perhaps this was a paraphrase of that original article, but if you can't see the original article, there's no way to validate that. So why they chose to paraphrase an article instead of sharing the original article? I'm not sure why. In this podcast, I always share the original document or primary source, whether that's a newspaper article, a chapter from a book, a section from some family's biography. I read it as is. I will comment on the article, but I don't paraphrase because I want you to hear it as it was written. While none of this surprised me, things got very interesting when I began to research the photograph of this person who was supposedly an Eastland disaster victim. The photograph had no identifying information about it. In other words, there was no information about where it came from or who donated it, or the name of the subject, the date the photograph was taken, the location or the studio where the photograph was taken. There was just the photo. But I like a challenge, so here is what I did. I ran it through a site called Tin Eye, T-I-N-E-Y-E, for a reverse image search. Nothing there. And then I uploaded the image to Google Images, and that search yielded seven results. Three were of the exact same photo. Four appeared to be the same person, but it was really hard to say for certain. And get this, every single one of these photos had a different name attached to it. And not one of them had the name of this person associated with the Eastland disaster. I'm not sure if this is an anomaly, but needless to say, I'm going to be doing a lot more work with Google Images and I'm going to take some of these profile photos that I locate here and there that have no identifying information and just see what else I come up with. While it's very true that photos get copied and AI modified and all that on the internet, if you have some place where the proper source citation is documented and noted, at least you have that to fall back on and rely on. So I hope I have convinced you of the importance of doing source citation, but that is just the beginning. I often refer to the work of Elizabeth Schoen Mills. Who is Elizabeth Schoen Mills? I talk about her a lot. I'm just going to quote from an article on FamilySearch.org. Elizabeth Schoen Mills has been recognized as the genealogist who has had the greatest impact on American genealogy in the post-roots era. She pioneered the institution of research methodology classes into the curriculum of genealogy courses. Her methodology became the standard approach used by many genealogical instructors. Rather than simply exposing students to sources and explaining where to find them, Mills began to teach how to use those records to wring every clue from them and to piece together bits and shards of evidence that, by themselves, mean nothing at all. Yet together they resolve the toughest stalemate. In her instruction, Mills stresses the importance of the genealogical proof standard and has sought to establish conventions for citing genealogical sources. That's from FamilySearch.org, but I also want to share a brief quote from Elizabeth from her book, Evidence Explained. All sources are not created equal. As students of history, we cannot judge the reliability of any information unless we know exactly where that information came from and the strengths and weaknesses of that source. That's the end of that quote, an atlas from Elizabeth Schoen Mill's book, Evidence Explained. Here she's telling us that just doing basic source citations is not enough. The source citations are just the beginning of the research. This is not a checkbox type of a thing. This is an invitation to go deep and to continue researching. So I hope that makes sense as to why this is so important. And finally, another unexpected gift of doing this research is that I keep finding people who were part of the Eastland disaster and get this. Their stories were told maybe once or twice in newspapers or in other publications, and that could have been from 1915 to 1980. Across the decades, these stories were told. They are easily accessible, they're freely accessible online, and yet they are left out in the modern retellings of the stories of the Eastland disaster. Except for platforms like this very podcast, other independent researchers and bloggers, and so on, that right there is the power that you and I have as independent researchers. And I've said this before and I want to keep saying it because in the last few years, some of the most important advances in a variety of disciplines, but I'm focusing on history and genealogy, they haven't come from institutions. They've come from independent researchers, historians, authors, and genetic genealogists, people willing to question, willing to dig, and follow the evidence where it leads. Think of it this way, as you and I do things like document history, we're also making history, although we don't really have a sense of that. Someone or a lot of someones will come after us and figure out what in the heck we've been doing here. But in the meantime, let's move on. This week I want to introduce you to a couple of people who were heroes and who have been left out of the Eastland disaster story. I want to introduce you to the Others Petroski will meet Walter Petrosky through his obituary. This death notice was from the Two Rivers reporter from Two Rivers, Wisconsin. The date is september twenty-ninth, nineteen fifty. Headline Captain Petroski, veteran Great Lakes Master, found in his bunk on McCool Cement Boat. Captain Walter J. Petrosky, sixty-seven, veteran Great Lakes shipmaster for fifty five years, who received a special citation for rescue work in the Eastland disaster in the Chicago River, July twenty fourth, nineteen fifteen, was found dead in his stateroom aboard the carrier, Daniel J. McCool, Friday morning. The McCool was moored at the dock of the Manawak Cement Company plant, taking on a load of cement. Captain Petroski had not answered the supper call Thursday night, but crew members thought he was indisposed. When he did not come to breakfast Friday, officers of the McCool visited his stateroom and found him dead. Dr. Theodore Tetans, County Coroner who was summoned, said the death was due to a heart attack. McCool's Master 15 Years. Captain Petrosky had been master of the McCool for the past 15 years. The carrier operates out of Manistee, Michigan to Chicago and Milwaukee. He was single and made his home at 611 Fifth Avenue, Kenosha, Wisconsin. Captain Petroski and his brother, the late Captain Amil Petrosky, were members of a crew of a passenger boat in Chicago Harbor the morning that the steamer Eastland, loaded with hundreds of excursionists of the Western Electric Company, was about to clear for a trip across the lake. Suddenly, the eastland rolled over in the river, submerging the happy excursionists. The death toll in the disaster totaled eight hundred and twelve lives. Headline. Captain Petroski and his brother manned a lifeboat and rescued several score survivors from the river. Both received medals from the city of Chicago for their rescue efforts. The McCool skipper was born in 1883 and started sailing at the age of twelve years out of Kowanee, that's Wisconsin. He was an officer on the carriers Ann Arbor, No. And later was master of the passenger steamers Potoski, Kansas, Missouri, and Prairie State on the Northern Michigan line. I want to stop here for a second. Petrosky is his last name, but Potosky is the name of the ship, and that was also the name of one of the ships that was lined up to take the passengers across Lake Michigan on the day of the Eastland disaster. So I just don't want you to get confused by the similar sounding names. We will continue. He was also captain of a number of pair marquette brake bulk boats in the early days, having obtained his master's license at the age of 19 years. His closest survivor is a niece, Mrs. Gladys Urodnik of Chicago, who is en route to Manawak to make funeral arrangements. Before we continue, I wanted to share a bit more about the background, some of the topics that were brought up in this very detailed death notice for Walter Petroski. First of all, Kowani, Wisconsin. And I'm talking about the period from the late 1800s to 1930 when this family was living there. So Kowani sits on Lake Michigan, and by the late 1800s, it had settled into a life as a small but important port town serving the surrounding farms and timberlands. So that might be where Walter as a child became entranced with the idea of being out on the Great Lakes. Early boosters once spread rumors of gold on the Kowani River to attract settlers, but what actually stuck were sawmills, the harbor, and its role as a county seat. Between 1880 and World War I, Kowani became an immigrant town. German, Czech, and Belgian families moved into the countryside, and by the 1920s and into the Depression, the Big Lumber era was fading. But Kowani had matured into a stable county hub, a place where the rhythm of life followed the harbor, the farm seasons, and the courthouse calendar. In Walter Petroski's 1942 draft registration card, he has his employer listed as the Medusa Portland Cement Company out of Cleveland, Ohio. This company grew out of a late 1800s Sandusky cement firm started by the Newberry family with corporate offices established in Cleveland. They eventually adopted the Medusa name, leaning into the mythological figure whose gaze turned people to stone as a way to brand their cement as strong and permanent. By the 1940s, Medusa was a significant regional producer, feeding huge demand for wartime construction, highways, and later post-war housing. Plants in places like Bay Bridge near Sandusky did the dusty work of grinding limestone into cement, while Cleveland handled management, finance, and sales, tying northern Ohio directly into the concrete and asphalt transformation of mid-century America. And of course, they needed to have all sorts of materials shipped all over the Great Lakes. So that's where Walter and his crew came into play. In Walter's death notice, they also mentioned that Walter was a Great Lakes shipmaster. On the Great Lakes, a shipmaster was the fully licensed captain in charge of a commercial vessel. Getting there to that level was a very long climb. Most began as teenage deck hands or ordinary seamen, such as Walter. And then they moved up to wheelsman and mate and spent years accumulating the sea time required to even apply for a master's license. In the early 1900s, federal rules on the lakes required formal licensing, exams, and documented service overseen from Great Lakes hubs by Marine Inspector. To become a master, a mariner had to pass tough tests in navigation, rules of the road, and safety, and earn an endorsement for the specific waters and vessel size they hoped to command. So that's a bit of backstory for this death notice for Walter. This article is from much earlier. It is from the Kowani Enterprise, and that's where the Petroski family was living. The date is Friday, May 25th, 1917. Headline Enlists in Navy. Walter J. Petroski, a brother of John Petrosky of this city, enlisted in the U.S. Navy at Chicago last week and will probably be given a commission as second lieutenant on one of Uncle Sam's boats. Mr. Petroski has had many years experience in marine work and was to have been captain of the steamer Potosky this year, but gave up the position to serve his country in the Navy. So you see the Petrosky family name associated with the Potosky steamer. I'm highlighting it so it doesn't get too confusing as things often do when going through this history. And here's an article about Emil Petrosky, Walter's brother, and also another rescuer during the Eastland disaster. This is from the Kowani Enterprise, Friday, January 3, 1936. Mr. and Mrs. Emil W. Petroski and daughter Gladys May of Chicago are spending the holidays with the John Petrovskys and Sheriff and Mrs. Walter Wesley in this city and with relatives throughout the country. It is Mr. Petroski's first visit to Kowani in seven years, and he is busy renewing acquaintances with his many friends in the old hometown, which he still insists is the quote best little city on earth, end quote. Mr. Petrovsk is employed by the Midland Steamship Lines of Cleveland, his last ship being the steamer E. N. Saunders Jr. When I was working on the Petrovski family tree, here are some highlights. So their father was from Poland, mother was from Wisconsin. I don't have a lot of details about them. It was a huge family. I'm still trying to figure out how many siblings there were in total. We met Walter via his obituary, but now let's get to know Emil Petrovsky. This is from the news palladium, and the date is September 19th, 1944. Headline Lake Captain Dies Chicago, September 19th, Associated Press. Amil W. Petrosky 56, a lieutenant commander in the Coast Guard Reserve and captain of the steamship W. G. Pollock, died last night of a heart ailment. He had been employed by the Midland Steamship Company of Cleveland for more than 30 years. Here's some additional information about Amil. He married a woman called Anna, and they had Gladys, Jasper, and Joseph. And here is a point of interest about this family and one that definitely needs more research. Both Jasper and Joseph died when they were in their early teens, approximately age 14 to age 16, but that's as much detail as I have right now. Gladys, their daughter, died in 1989 at the age of 67. Now stepping back to that initial death notice for Walter, there was a lot of detail in there about the participation of both Walter and Emil Petrovsk during the Eastland disaster. They were heroes, their heroism was noted, and I'm guessing that this was a family story that was passed down. And I'm also guessing, and I cannot prove this, that Emil's daughter, Gladys, may have been the source for the information about her dad and her uncle's heroism. And what I'm hoping is that when I publish this podcast, that someone from that family will stumble across it during a search and find out this wonderful information about Amil and Walter. Actually, that's the way I have met a lot of Eastland family members during the last few years. They'll hear a podcast or see something that I've written, and they reach out, and a friendship of sorts is born. And the story of the Petrovsky brothers was never picked up in any modern retellings, so it too was in danger of being lost. Goodness knows for how long. And one of the other things that motivates me as I do this work, it's not just because of my own family's involvement in the Eastland disaster, or even other families' involvement in the Eastland disaster. There's also another, I don't know what to call it, side benefit or gift. There's also a boost that I get, at least, when I discover a long-lost, unknown relative that actually did something amazing. A few years ago, I found out that I am a fourth cousin to a woman called Hildegard Pepplau, and she's sometimes called the mother of modern psychiatric nursing. So to find someone like Hildegard Pepplau was truly extraordinary. And here's another sidebar. When I was putting myself through undergrad, I worked for Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve. This was a long time ago. And I worked for the director of psychiatric nursing. And guess whose photo she had on her wall? Yep, I used to pass the photo of Hildegard Pepplau every day, not knowing that this was a relative. I mean, really, this wasn't the first time I'd run into Hildegard Pepplau via one of her photos, but that's another story for another time. As podcaster Jim Harold often says, it's too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence. But those are the kinds of delights and inspirations you can occasionally stumble across when you follow history. So I will end here with another public service announcement. RootsTech starts on Thursday, this Thursday, March 5th, and the times vary depending on where you are, but go to their website and I'll put a link in the show notes and sign up. If you only attend one session of interest, it will be worth it. The price is free. Don't forget that too. And in case you don't know, Roots Tech is the world's largest genealogy conference, which is organized by Family Search and is held in Salt Lake City, but many of the sessions are also streamed online, and that's the way I attend. And just think of it as a big annual gathering for anyone interested in tracing family history, in understanding the past through records, archives, and DNA. And I'm sure they will be doing quite a few sessions about AI and genealogy. That's it for this week. And I want to thank you again for helping me reach a milestone that I actually didn't know was a milestone, but 7,500 downloads. That is really motivating for me to continue and to uncover and share even more biographies of these people who were part of the Eastland disaster. And who knows, maybe one of them is one of your family members. So keep listening. In the meantime, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and please stay safe. 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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