Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

“You’ll Spoil the Boat”: Elmer Nelson, the Torch, and the Evidence

• Natalie Zett • Season 5 • Episode 177

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What does a bad grade on a high-school term paper have to do with the 1915 Eastland disaster? This week is part history, part confession, and part detective story — and it starts with some genuinely good news.

There is a new Eastland documentary — The Eastland Tragedy: July 24, 1915, from Chicago's WTTW/PBS! I braced for the usual retellings and instead found something that felt like a world premiere. It features the story about one of the divers, Iver Johnson, as told by his grandson. Link below.

Then, a confession. Meet Mrs. K, my tenth-grade English teacher. Whenever we students skipped footnotes, Mrs. K would return our papers and on the cover she would write, LAZY, LAZY, LAZY in red pen. I still have my personalized LAZY LAZY LAZY paper somewhere.

I spent years with a love-hate relationship to footnotes... and then life dropped me into a calling where I am absolutely immersed in them. You'll understand the irony by the end.

At the heart of the episode is a man named Elmer Nelson — Dave Nelson's grandfather, a structural ironworker who showed up at the capsized Eastland with an acetylene torch. And I went looking for more info about him. (Note: Dave Nelson, otherwise known as Mr. Eastland, had been researching the Eastland and sharing his work since 1972. Dave recently passed away and I featured Dave in the last episode, Mr. Eastland and the Night at the Museum. Link below.)

While searching for more info about Elmer's connection to the disaster, I stumbled onto a modern retelling. Something about it felt forced, a little off. Then I saw the problem: it carried no source citation at all — nothing to back up its claims, nothing to trace them to. Was this fact or fiction? Citations are often missing in modern retellings of the Eastland disaster.

An account without source citations places a brick wall between us and the actual history. I couldn't use that modern article other than as an example of how not to do research, and I kept searching. After a lot of trial and error, I traced the story back to what may be its 1915 source — where I noticed the modern version had been changed in ways worth pausing over. 

As a successful graduate of Mrs. K's 10th grade English class, I admit that as I do this Eastland history research there are days where I too want to pick up her red pen — but I'd change the mantra to: SOURCE, SOURCE, SOURCE.

And the next time you read a "historical" account with no source in sight, you may never look at it the same way again.

Resources

  • The Eastland Tragedy July 24, 1915  (New documentary about a luxury steamer overturning in the Chicago River.  WTTW, Chicago's PBS station.)
  • Natalie Zett, “Mr. Eastland and the Night at the Museum,” Flower in the River Podcast, ep. 176, July 23, 2026.
  • “‘You’ll Spoil the Boat,’ Captain Tells Rescuers,” Chicago Examiner, July 25, 1915, 69. 
  • Bailey, Jonathan. Plagiarism Today. A useful resource on plagiarism, copyright, attribution, and the misuse of creative and research work. Although its focus is largely contemporary and online, many of the same ethical issues apply to historical writing and research.
  • Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace, 4th ed. (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2024)
  • Hume, Robert W., managing editor. Acetylene Journal. Vol. 17, 1915–1916. Chicago: Acetylene Journal Publishing Company. Google Books.

Welcome To Flower In The River

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 episode 177 of Flower in the River, and I hope you're doing well.

A New Eastland Documentary Discovery

Natalie Zett

Before we start with this week's feature, I want to share some good news, really good news. Last week, someone who was looking for a possible connection to another person I had profiled reached out, and he shared that he worked for TV station WTTW in Chicago. Its full name is WTTWPBS, otherwise known as the Public Broadcasting Service. He shared a link to a recent documentary about the Eastland disaster. The Eastland Tragedy, July 24th, 1915, is a local public television program that is presented by WTTW. Its release date was July 19th, 2026. When I saw that, I immediately thought it's probably going to be the same stories that most of us have heard for the last 20, 25 years. And then I scrubbed through it, meaning I just ran my cursor across the footage to see if there was anything new or unusual. Lo and behold, we have what appears to be a world premiere of sorts. This time the focus was on a grandson of one of the divers. The diver was Ivor Johnson. In my Eastland research, I've seen the name Ivor Johnson, but I don't think I've come upon a complete story. And now to have his grandson share that story, that is an incredible gift to all of us. And another Eastland researcher also appeared in this video, someone I'd never heard of, but I thought that is great. The more actual researchers, historians, etc., who weigh in on the disaster's history and who are guided by evidence, not marketing, the better outcome for the Eastland disaster history. And I will put a link to this documentary. It is called The Eastland Tragedy, July 24th, 1915, and it's being presented by WTTWPBS in Chicago. Early

Manual Typewriters And Footnote Trauma

Natalie Zett

on, when I started to see that the majority of the people who were listed as part of the Eastland disaster had no biographies, I began working really fast. And the trade-off for moving this quickly is that there's often a higher probability for errors or omissions. So I always worry about that. I have a rather fraught relationship with things like footnoting, source citation, and so on. I do. And I have been waiting for an opportunity to slip in this story from my high school years. So Mrs. K was our tenth grade English teacher, and we liked her. But she was adamant about doing footnotes when we would write our papers. And that meant if you quoted a source, you had to number the quote in superscript type, which sometimes didn't work out well because we were using, wait for it, manual typewriters for the most part. And my family couldn't afford one of the nicer typewriters, and so we got ours from Goodwill, and it was a sight to behold. It actually looked like something that probably was from the early 1900s. I don't know. I wish we had held on to it because right now it would be quite the collectible. But back then it was honestly a pain in the butt to work with. And that's what I used for my papers. It was a very physical experience working with those machines because as you typed, the keys would stick, and if you move the paper down to document a source in the footer, and you scrolled down too far, the paper would shoot out of the platin. And those are the two rollers that held the paper in place. And yet most of the significant writing of the twentieth century was done on those types of contraptions. But back to Mrs. K. Mrs. K required that our footnoting, our source citations, had to match exactly what was prescribed in Kate Terrabian's book. It was called A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses and Dissertations. It is now in its ninth edition. As much as I liked writing, this experience was painful, and for an impatient high school kid with attention problems, it was torture. If you didn't cite your sources in accordance with that book by Kate Terabian, Mrs. K would return your paper, and on the cover of your paper, she would write lazy, lazy, lazy, in red ink, three times. After a while as the semester progressed, it was kind of a badge of honor to get one of those, but when my turn came, it was after hours of mistakes and getting frustrated, and as I was doing my paper, it was getting late. By then I had made so many mistakes that I realized I would have to probably type at least half the paper over again. There was no easy way to make corrections on the page where you made the error. So the solution was do the whole thing over. And after four hours of sleep, I never wanted to see that damn paper again, so I handed it in, and the next day I got my paper back with the expected lazy, lazy, lazy in big red letters on the cover. It resembled blood spatter from a crime scene. I wanted to cry and say, no, it was not a case of lazy, lazy, lazy. It was a case of tired, tired, tired. But I did the paper over anyway and repaired the damage. Ever since then, I've had kind of a love-hate relationship to source citations and footnotes. I did them, of course, they are essential, but I never loved doing them. However, fast forward. It wasn't until I started working in genealogy and then, of course, in the Eastland disaster history, that I saw firsthand what happens when someone leaves out a source citation or footnote. That renders the story or the record untraceable and unprovable. I realize that the source citations are a bridge. If you don't do them, you're creating fantasy and fiction, and for the most part, it's not very good fiction at all. Now, Mrs. K has gone on to that classroom in the sky, but if she was looking over my shoulder and had seen some of what I had seen in the last three years in terms of the Eastland disaster source citation, or lack thereof, she probably would have run out of red ink by now. So

Dave Nelson And Why Elmer Matters

Natalie Zett

this little detour is going to lead us into today's topic. First, I hope you had a chance to listen to last week's episode, which was a tribute to the late Dave Nelson. Now, Dave, his wife Rose, and actually their entire family had been actively caring for the history of the Eastland disaster since 1972. Long before anyone else got involved. Anyone working on the Eastland disaster history needs to give Dave a lot of credit. And Dave also did something that I have never seen before or since. He created an actual Eastland Disaster Museum and funded it himself. Despite that work, he has seldom been given credit. Last week's episode was devoted to Dave Nelson, and this week we're going to take some time to get to know Dave's grandfather, Elmer Nelson, the reason Dave got involved with the Eastland disaster to begin with.

The Acetylene Torch On Disaster Day

Natalie Zett

Elmer Nelson, Dave's grandfather, was working nearby when the Eastland overturned, and he arrived on the scene with an acetylene torch. He didn't just happen to be carrying one of those around. It was part of his job. It will probably help to understand at a high level what acetylene welding involved, officially called oxyacetylene welding, and sometimes called gas welding, uses a mixture of oxygen and acetylene to produce an extremely hot, and I mean extremely hot, like 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit concentrated flame, yow. And this process actually emerged in the early 20th century. But before this innovation, joining heavy pieces of metal often meant heating them in a forge and hammering them together, like the work my great grandfather did as a blacksmith. Oxyacetylene welding gave metal workers far more control. So with that torch, they could heat, cut, and fuse metal precisely, and use equipment that was portable enough to take directly to a construction site, factory, railroad yard, shipyard, or in this case a disaster site. This work was not simply a matter of pointing a flame at a piece of steel. The welder had to regulate two pressurized gases, adjust the flame correctly, judge the temperature of the metal, control the molten weld pool, and move the torch and filler rod together at a steady pace. This is what Elmer Nelson and others were doing on the day the Eastland capsized. They're out in the July heat, a ship has capsized, people are dying or already departed, and the pressure is on them to do this very delicate work. This work carried serious risks, so they were putting themselves in danger as well. So right now we're going to look under the hood so I can tell you what I learned about Dave's grandfather Elmer. This is

Building A Family Tree From Records

Natalie Zett

not going to be a straight-up bio, but I'm going to walk you through this process, this methodology, because I want you to see what I generally see when I go looking for the biographies of people of the Eastland. First things first, the most helpful thing I do is create a family tree, and I did that for Elmer Nelson and his family. I'll share his biography with you, and I will also tell you about a significant record that acted as a Rosetta Stone. When I say Rosetta Stone, I'm not talking about the actual physical Rosetta Stone or the software. I'm referring to a crucial clue, breakthrough, or discovery that unlocks the answer to a complicated problem. So Elmer Nelson was a Swedish immigrant to the United States, and his original name was Knut David Helmar Nielsen. He was born in 1886 in Kalmar, Sweden, immigrated twice between 1902 and 1905, and he got married to another Swedish immigrant in 1909, and they were living in Chicago. So far, pretty standard immigration story here. But here comes the Rosetta Stone. That would be Elmer Nelson's draft registration card from 1917. And here's what I learned. In 1917 he was still referring to himself as Halmar, that's H J A L M A R David Nelson. Later and for the rest of his life, at least publicly, he was known as Elmer. And he's living at eight eight five eight Yale Avenue in Chicago. And in nineteen seventeen he was not yet a citizen, but he was a declarant, so he wanted to become a citizen. And he was born in Sweden. And his occupation was structural ironworker. His employer was Thomson Starr Company in Chicago. He was married with one child under the age of twelve, and he describes himself as tall and slender with blue eyes. This document is valuable because Elmer himself completed it. It wasn't completed for him by a government worker or somebody else. At that point I had the beginning of what I was hoping would be a very detailed biography of Elmer Nelson, something that I was hoping could help me find a record or two that talked about his involvement with the Eastland disaster recovery and rescue. I was searching online platforms for information about Elmer Nelson's work on the Eastland, and I thought it would be easy to find, but it was not. Instead, it got kind of messy. And the messiness comes from documentation practices. I'm not referring to a person or an organization. I'm simply talking about documentation practices. And as you will soon see, some documentation practices bring us close to the actual history while others create a brick wall.

When Missing Citations Create A Wall

Natalie Zett

I found an Eastland related article, and part of its title had to do with welders and the Eastland. I'm going to read only a part of this article. Quote, as the welders frantically worked to reach struggling passengers, they were met with resistance from Eastland captain Harry Peterson. Captain Pederson had objected to the work being performed by the welders and ordered them to stop cutting holes in the hull as they were quote ruining his ship, end quote. Those observing the spectacle called for the captain to be lynched or drowned. One welder, Elmer Nelson, recalled, quote, he, the captain, told me to stop. I did stop for a minute, but the police arrested him and I went back again from the hole I helped to make in the hall. We pulled three persons to safety. End of that quote. I will not read the rest of the article. These are the most important parts. Now obviously, this person who wrote the article wasn't there in 1915. This was a snippet probably from a newspaper article somewhere. There was no source citation, no footnote. That means it's unverifiable. Is it fiction? Is it a work of someone's imagination? It's certainly based on what happened, but we can't count this as part of the history because there's no way to verify it. By not telling us where the information came from. This article does not invite us into the history. What it does is it builds a wall around the story and leaves us standing outside, unable to see the evidence for ourselves to continue the research. The lack of source citations is something I run into all the time with the Eastland Disaster History. I won't use anything that I find that does not have a source citation. Otherwise, I'm part of the problem. The good news is that I was able to locate an article that this particular article seemed to borrow from. However, as you will hear, they were also either taking very creative liberties or they had another article that they were using as a source. If that was the case, then they created a patchwork article. But since we don't know where this came from, this is just a guess. When a citation is missing, what I do is search for distinctive phrases that appear in the unsourced writing. Those phrases can often lead me back to the primary source. And a lot of times I have had luck using that method. However, it doesn't work all the time. In this unsourced article, there was a unique phrase, and it was quote unquote ruining his ship. In fact, in that article, they put it in quotes, so I figured it probably came from a newspaper article. So I searched several variations of the phrase, including ruin ship and ruin my ship, limiting the results to Chicago between July and August 1915. Nothing turned up. Next, I also looked up both Halmar Nelson and Elmer Nelson in the Chicago Papers from July to August 1915, and I looked on every possible newspaper site by the way, paid and free. There was nothing. Nothing. I was getting frustrated, I will admit it. And finally I searched on the term welder. Same location, same time period. And I found what seems to be the original article, or at least one of the original articles that was used. This

Finding The 1915 Chicago Examiner Source

Natalie Zett

is from the Chicago Examiner and the date is July twenty fifth, nineteen fifteen. Headline You'll spoil the boat, Captain tells rescuers. Hey, stop that. You'll spoil the boat. That was Captain Harry Patterson's greeting to the fifty expert machinists, who were called to cut holes in the side of the overturned steamer Eastland to rescue the hundreds of men, women, and children imprisoned in her. The men, armed with powerful acetylene burners, were burning holes in the iron sides of the boat. Who told you to do that? The captain demanded. The police and firemen, answered E. Nelson, a welder, who works on the new Boston store's steel framework. Quote, Well, I don't want the boat spoiled. You get off of here. End quote, ordered Pederson. Pederson tried to stop a number of men who were trying to rescue screaming women and children inside. Then Deputy Shuttler of the police saw him. Arrest that man and every one of his crew, ordered Shuttler. This damned old tub ought to be burned years ago. Go spoil his boat. Arrest every one of them. There's more to this article, but this seems to be the segment that was borrowed without attribution. We'll do a bit of compare and contrast between the two articles. The main thing which I've already covered is that the newer adaptation has no source citation. So we are guessing that this is the article or one of the articles they borrowed from. Here's the next thing. This newer adaptation used this phrase ruining his boat in quotes. As mentioned, I was unable to locate that phrase in any of the articles that related to the Eastland disaster from that time period. Instead, the nineteen fifteen article leads off with this headline, you'll spoil the boat. Similar but definitely not the same. Now in the newer adaptation, Elmer Nelson is listed first name, last name, and they also included this rather lengthy quote from Elmer. But Elmer Nelson is not listed in the original. In the original it is initial E Nelson. And also what E Nelson said in the nineteen fifteen article and what Elmer Nelson allegedly said in this modern article, these quotes don't match up. In the nineteen fifteen article, E. Nelson responds to a question from Pederson, and all he's quoted as saying is the police and firemen. That's it. While we can assume they are the same people, the problem could have been solved had they only cited the source or sources that they used. And you are probably wondering, as I am, why did they not just simply reprint the article and give proper attribution? I don't know. But this is one of those documentation practices that I have seen a lot, and I'm not sure what purpose this serves. It doesn't serve the history, that's for sure. Let's

What The Articles Get Wrong

Natalie Zett

take a closer look at Elmer Nelson's profession and the company he worked for. On his draft registration card, Elmer shared that he was working as a structural iron worker and the company that employed him was Thomson Starrett. So Elmer Nelson, or E. Nelson, was described in the 1915 article as a welder. However, that's not quite accurate. Errors happen in newspapers, especially during a crisis like the Eastland disaster. The problem is that after 1915, the description was repeated as fact. But according to Nelson's draft registration card, he was a structural ironworker, not simply a welder. As genealogists and historians, our job is not merely to repeat what has already been written, it is to examine the records and describe a person's life as accurately as the evidence allows. Structural ironworkers and welders had a lot in common, but there were some key differences. A welder, generally speaking, is someone whose work centers on joining metal or in some cases cutting it, using heat and specialized equipment such as acetylene torches. A structural iron worker has a broader job which includes welding. Structural iron workers build and assemble the steel framework of buildings, bridges or other large structures, and they work with beams, columns, girders, and trusses. They may lift steel into position, align it, bolt or rivet it together. And sometimes they would weld or cut it. So welding was indeed one of the many skills that Elmer Nelson possessed, but that wasn't the entirety of his work. Now Nelson's employer was Thompson Starrett, and they were a New York-based construction contracting and engineering firm founded in 1899 by Theodore Starrett and Henry Sopey Thompson. Theodore Starrett had earlier worked in Chicago, and the company became nationally known for major steel frame skyscrapers. In Chicago, the firm's work included major commercial projects such as the Sears Roebuck and Company complex and the Palmer House. Now, in terms of this new Boston store that was mentioned in the 1915 article, I couldn't find a direct source in the material that links Thompson's Starr itself to the Boston store in 1915. But what is clear is that the Boston store site was undergoing phase construction and expansion between 1905 and 1917. When you work in genealogy or history or even any type of research, what you sign up for is to be as thorough as possible, to question everything, and of course, I hope you understand why it is so important to cite our sources. Because the source or sources weren't cited in that article, I couldn't use it. Instead, I had to rely on this 1915 article, which is good, but it's very incomplete. More research needs to be done. Elizabeth

Evidence Explained And Ethical Research

Natalie Zett

Schoen Mills is a historian, a genealogist, and the author of Evidence Explained, one of the standard guides for citing and evaluating historical records. For Mills, a citation does more than tell readers where something was found. It preserves the trail back to the record and provides the details needed to judge its reliability. Without that trail, we are being asked to accept a claim without being given the means to examine it. As she teaches, sources provide information, researchers identify and analyze the evidence, and only then can we reach a sound conclusion. And here is what Elizabeth Schoen Mills had to say about paraphrasing. Paraphrasing is legitimate when someone genuinely explains another's ideas in their own words and provides attribution. Simply swapping words around is not real paraphrasing. In addition, she also said tweaking someone else's words won't make them ours. It has been a while since I've walked you through the behind the scenes work that I do, and I know it can feel painstaking and ponderous, but this is a big part of the work of a genealogist or any serious researcher. It's what we sign up for when we say yes to this type of research. And I owe that care to every person connected to the Eastland disaster, not just my own family, but all of them. I owe them the best work I can bring. I owe them respect. And part of that respect is being as meticulous as possible with the records, the documentation, and my own conclusions. And when I make a mistake, and I do, I need to correct it and tell you about it. This week we needed to follow the evidence wherever it led. I had hoped for some different outcomes, but this is the outcome the records gave me. This also shows why we need to apply the rigorous standards Elizabeth Schoen Mills brings to historical research. When we study the Eastland disaster, every claim, every source, and every repeated detail, including the unsubstantiated death toll, needs to be examined because repetition may make an error familiar, but it does not make it true. And I'd like to think that somewhere in that big classroom in the sky, Mrs. K is reaching for that red pen, but maybe she's mellowed on the other side, and instead of writing lazy, lazy, lazy, she might now be writing source, source, source. And

New Season Plans And Next Steps

Natalie Zett

this marks a new season in Flower in the River. I always count a new season every time the anniversary of the Eastland disaster comes and goes. I have so many people who were part of the Eastland disaster, but whose stories, well, they were only told once or twice, but never picked up in the 21st century. I do want to get to those stories because each one is different and I think really fascinating. And now because of the Elmer Nelson experience, I do need to go back and locate some of these Eastland people who have stories but who have no source citations and take a look and see what I can find. So that's two groups of people that I will be busy with in the coming year. In the meantime, you take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Stay safe, and I'll talk to you next week. And I promise we'll have more stories. Hey,

Closing And How To Support

Natalie Zett

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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