"Flower in the River" 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.
When someone survives the 1915 Eastland disaster, gives a firsthand newspaper account just days later, and, years later, both she and her story disappear from later retellings, a big disconnect emerges. And the disconnect may be because the research didn't go deep enough before the broader Eastland story was repackaged and repeated.
In this episode, I go back to the July 28, 1915 Hudson Observer and use newspaper accounts published at the time to show what happens when documented evidence collides with later lists.
First, I return to Martha Willig’s remarkable survivor account and the frustrating fact that her family’s documented connection to the Eastland still isn’t widely represented online. Her story was well documented and is one of the more complete survivor accounts. And yet it was never carried forward.
Then I turn to the Remy family, who came to Chicago from New Jersey through their connection to Western Electric. The 1915 newspaper reports clearly establish their relationships, addresses, ages, and community ties. Later compilations manage to separate the family, muddle the facts, and—just for good measure—lose the source citations.
I also share tips for researching your own family’s history, including how MyHeritage’s Scribe AI can help with translation and historical context. It can be a very useful starting point, but it still needs to be checked against the records.
And I share a current experiment of mine: creating research field notes in Vellum, a Mac program designed for formatting books (including eBooks), or Atticus, a similar publishing tool. I’m using them to keep records, commentary, and citations together in one clean, shareable document that can be updated as the research reveals additional information.
This episode is for anyone working with Eastland history, Chicago history, genealogy, or the larger question of how historical claims are built and supported. Share it with a fellow researcher, follow the sources, and keep the evidence moving forward.
Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/270549532/ella_florence-remy: accessed 27 Aug 2026), memorial page for Ella Florence Goelz Remy (Apr 1874–24 Jul 1915), Find a Grave Memorial ID 270549532, citing Grove Church Cemetery, North Bergen, Hudson County, New Jersey, USA; Maintained by Burt (contributor 46867609).
Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/270549537/florence_a-remy: accessed 27 Aug 2026), memorial page for Florence A. Remy (1896–24 Jul 1915), Find a Grave Memorial ID 270549537, citing Grove Church Cemetery, North Bergen, Hudson County, New Jersey, USA; Maintained by Burt (contributor 46867609).
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 181 of Flower in the River, and I hope you're doing alright. This week we are continuing with the July 28th, 1915 issue of the Hudson Observer. If you listened to last week's episode, you heard the first part of that story. It featured the account of Eastland survivor Martha Willig, her future husband Otto Larson, her brother William Willig, and her brother-in-law, Louis Cruz, the only person in their party who lost his life. I originally covered Martha's story about two years ago, but I returned to it recently after another Eastland family member contacted me. They shared that the descendants of Martha's family had apparently been trying since about 2014 to have Martha and Otto included on a list of people associated with the Eastland disaster. And as of this morning, the Willig Larson family is still not mentioned on any online platform related to the Eastland disaster, with the exception of my website. I wanted to bring Martha's own account forward again. Not only because it's this incredible firsthand account, it is one of the many, many lives and many, many stories that is at risk of being lost. And also the descendants of this family need to know that this story, this gripping, incredible evidence means more than having a name on a spreadsheet someplace. The Willig Larson family has something that I only wish all of our families had, some type of firsthand reaction or account, and the idea of having it buried, lost or ignored. Well, that is just, as they say, beyond the pale. Since that episode just a few days ago, I heard from two other Eastland family members with similar concerns. Their relatives were involved in the disaster very clearly, but their stories aren't represented, or the story that does exist is unrecognizable to the family members. Now that I'm being contacted by a lot more family members, I'm starting to see patterns. I'm starting to see some of the fallout, the way that this historiography has unfolded. It's not really the history
of the Eastland disaster, but it's the history of how the history has been handled. And that got me to thinking about lineage societies, something I normally don't think about. If you're a genealogist, you probably know what I'm talking about. Think of organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution, the DAR, or the Mayflower Society. And I don't qualify for either one of those, by the way. But I do have a relative by marriage who belonged to the Mayflower Society. And I saw the documentation he had to assemble to get admitted, and I found the amount of documentation and the detail that he had to provide to be very daunting. I can't think of another word for it at this moment. I think the process took him a couple of years. Generally, a lineage society begins with defined criteria. The Mayflower Society has one set, the DAR has another, and you document descent or whatever qualifying relationship that these organizations require. And in case you can't tell, this is a very general high-level overview. Membership in these various lineage societies, for the most part, has a boundary. From the few that I've reviewed, they have very specific requirements, qualifications, and you have to meet those in order to be a member. And when it comes to the Eastland disaster, the Eastland disaster is not something that can be converted into a lineage society, such as the DAR or the Mayflower Society. It was a historical event, a mass casualty involving a large, complicated, interconnected population. There were people who died and people who survived. There were Western electric employees, crew members, rescuers, witnesses, clergy, physicians, undertakers, investigators, journalists, and even colorful scoundrels masquerading as heroes, such as Arthur Loeb, who I covered a couple of episodes ago. Historical research works differently from a lineage society. It isn't about establishing who qualifies for some membership or who belongs on a list. It asks the broader questions. Who was involved? What happened? What can the surviving evidence actually establish? It should not be deciding who gets admitted into the Eastland Club because there is no Eastland Club, though sometimes you could certainly get that impression. When any type of entity presents an unsubstantiated list as authoritative, and especially when that list comes with recognition, certificates, validation, or some other markers of belonging, it can begin to function socially, almost like a lineage register, but it's not. And although I'm directing much of this conversation toward fellow Eastland family members, I would hope that no one would ever give an unsubstantiated, unsourced list that kind of power over your family's history. Let's take another look at Martha Willig from last week's episode. We have her first person account published in a newspaper just four days after the disaster. More evidence exists for her than for many people who were part of the Eastland disaster. So if Martha Willig's name cannot be found on some Eastland list that presents itself as authoritative, that missing name tells us a great deal about the completeness and the reliability of that list. The list does not get to outrank the evidence. And here are the patterns that I keep seeing. We have lists of names with no biographies attached to them. We have biographies with no source citations, which means there is no way for the next researcher to follow the trail. And now, at this point, I have located nearly 300 people who were part of the Eastland disaster in one way or the other, yet are completely absent from most retellings and revisions, except for my coverage on this podcast. What does that tell us? Well, it tells us that these retellings, these revisions,
they need a lot more work. And in some ways this reflects a much larger shift that is happening all around us. Many of the institutions we have traditionally relied upon are struggling with reduced funding, fewer staff, and limited resources. I appreciate those particular institutions and the work they continue to do. But here's the thing when gaps appear, other people begin stepping into that space. And that can be a positive thing or a not so positive thing. But increasingly, those people are individuals like me and like you. We do not all have the same training or experience or skills, but across the country, independent historians, genealogists, family researchers, archivists, and so many others are doing remarkable work locating missing records, correcting errors, restoring names and rebuilding parts of the historical record that may become permanently lost. And there are so many ways you can find these people. Instagram, of all places, has become an increasingly good place to find independent historians and genealogists, many of whom spent years concentrating on a very specific subject. Over time, many of them develop an extraordinary depth of knowledge. They may never receive recognition from a major institution, by the way, but you can evaluate their work the same way you evaluate anyone else's work. Look at the research. Look at the sources. Look at the evidence they uncover and what that evidence allows us to continue researching. Do they cite their sources? That means they're being transparent. If they don't cite their sources and they are trying to present themselves as experts, you want to question that. I recently found one such researcher on Instagram and immediately began subscribing to their newsletter. I do not want to risk mangling the pronunciation of their name, so I'll link to their site reclaimingmystory.com in the show notes. What caught my attention was the writing. In their most recent newsletter, they said, quote, there is a quiet shift that happens once you begin unearthing primary records. People often talk about the research phase, the databases, the census records, the census schedules and land deeds, but they rarely talk about what happens internally afterward. And then came this line. You stop seeking validation from institutions that erased you. That stopped me cold. Because whatever the circumstances that produced an incomplete historical record, we can see the result. People were omitted, their stories disappeared from later accounts, even though they were and are very much a part of this history. And Martha Willig is one example, and there are so many more.
Well, moving along, I did promise to give you some ideas for ways that you can document, preserve, share, and above all, protect your family's history. This week I had a couple of opportunities to respond to requests from two separate Eastland family members. And I will explain how I responded to one person's request. The solution I came up with, it might be a long-term thing, or it might just prove to work for this situation. But above all, remember that you have to experiment if you want to engage in this type of work. And a lot of people will provide a lot of advice, but not everyone's advice is going to work for you. Find something that works for you, something you can live with. And as time passes, don't be afraid to try something new just to shake things up in a good way. Every so often I do that, I'll try a new app or piece of software or something similar. Even if I don't end up liking it or buying it, I will at least have tried something different. Because it's so easy to get into a rut. One of the people who contacted me also had lost a teenage great aunt on the Eastland. He gave me her name and I immediately recognized it. While doing a search on familysearch.org using its full text search, which I highly recommend, by the way, I found a massive group of insurance records from the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America. They are located in Chicago, by the way, and this person's teenage great aunt was one of the people who was insured through them. I think I had four or five records connected to her, and I sent those records direct to her relative just as I found them. But afterward I thought, now what? Those records were going to go right back into a folder on my computer where they would sit until someday I rediscovered them and said something like I forgot I had all of this information about this woman. There had to be a better way, I thought. And there was another issue with these particular records. Most of them were written in Polish, and I don't know whether this family member reads Polish and my own Polish reading skills are somewhere between kindergarten and first grade on a good day. I could have run those documents through something like Google Translate, but translation alone, and particularly AI translation, should never be treated as the final word. It's just a beginning. And what about the context? What did all of this mean in 1915? So I decided to try another tool called Scribe AI, and this is available through MyHeritage. I gave it the original documents and it provided the translation and also it provided a historical context. Did it get everything 100% correct or close? I don't know. And that's precisely why I didn't treat its output as the final word, because with this research it's always ongoing. And yet we have a baseline. We have something that can be checked against other evidence, something that can be corroborated, corrected, or expanded as additional information turns up. And that's much more useful. And the next question was how do I organize all of this and how do I make it accessible and shareable? My first thought was to create another Word document, but I thought, does the world need another Word document? My world doesn't. I wanted that I could keep adding to because genealogy is basically one long exercise in course correction. You find something new, you have to
correct it. You discover something that made sense six months ago no longer makes sense at all. So I turned to a tool called Vellum, that's V-E-L-L-U-M, which I normally use for publishing books. Vellum is Mac only, although Atticus is a similar program which is available on other platforms besides Mac. So I put the documents, transcriptions, the translations, and the commentary into Vellum, and suddenly I had something much easier to work with. It had chapter headings, a table of contents, my source citations, and I added a cover page and a copyright page. And yes, I am adamant about that copyright and attribution page, because after seeing so many copyrights, attributions, and source citations disappear from Eastland material in the last few years, I wanted to make a source trail built directly into my own work. And I call this research field notes. It's not finished, it's something ongoing. And using a tool like Vellum or like Atticus means that when I find something new, I can simply add it and regenerate a brand new document. Much less hassle. And the output, the compiled book or booklet, is gorgeous. I love having something like this, and it's nice to be able to share this with family members and people who are interested in this history. Also, on my hard drive, I have a big folder called People of the Eastland. And once you're inside that thing, it literally looks like a very colorful cemetery. But there are so many names and so many file folders. I can't believe it some days. And what I wanted was for each person to have a unique look so I could find them easier. And there are ways to do that with colors and with images on the folders. But once you're inside those folders and you see all these documents, JPEGs, PDFs, docs, etc., where is the central document that you can refer to? Well, when you create a book or booklet in Vellum or Atticus, you've got something that absolutely stands out. You can make a unique cover for each book, and that makes it, at least for me, easy to find, and it's certainly easy to update, and then even easier to regenerate. And right now this is an experiment, but I do think there's a lot of value in doing this, particularly if you, like me, have a lot of people that you are trying to keep track of in your own family tree. And also if you have all these supporting documents and images, give it a try. And if you're interested, let me know, and I will come up with some sort of tutorial. Because I don't think the people who created Vellum were thinking of this as a use case, but it absolutely is a use case.
Now I want to return to the July 28th, 1915 issue of the Hudson Observer. Again, that's Hudson County, New Jersey, and this is a continuation of the article we began last week with Martha Willig's first person account of surviving the Eastland disaster. At this point in the article, the focus shifts to other families and individuals from Hudson County who were involved in the Eastland disaster. Originally, I thought I would simply read through these names and investigate. Each person at a very high level. That plan did not last very long. Almost immediately, I ran into something that needs a much closer look. Although I addressed the issues that I ran into with this situation, I have a lot more experience than I did two years ago. And also at this point, I want to be a little more adamant about the types of errors that I run into and talk about what can be done to repair the damage and to recover the actual story. Here's the next part of this article from the July 28th, 1915 issue of the Hudson Observer. It is now known that at least 12 of the victims of the Eastland disaster were formerly residents of Hudson County. Reports of the narrow escapes of eight others who were on the vessel when she keeled over have also been received. So far as it is known, all of these people were employed by or connected with the Western Electric Company and moved from Hudson County when the company went to Chicago. Those who are known to have perished are Mrs. Ella Reemy, that's R-E-M-Y, and her daughter Florence, formerly of 108 Hudson Avenue, West Hoboken. And there's more to this article, but I'm going to stop right here. The Remy family is actually an excellent example of what happens when people become disconnected from the records that document their lives. But first I want to give you a brief high level background on the New York, New Jersey connection to Western Electric in Chicago. Western Electric's New York operation is one part of the Eastland story, and employees were transferred or relocated to the Chicago area as the company's work shifted to the massive Hawthorne works. What I have found so far suggests that among those making the move were skilled workers and technical personnel, such as toolmakers, machinists, inspectors, and apparatus assemblers. And of course, when people relocated, families relocated with them. And that brings
us to the Remy family. When I first started researching Ella and Florence Remy, both of whom died on the Eastland, I did my usual sweep of online sources, and one of the first things I found was their Find a Grave memorials. Bert, no last name, is the person who maintains a particularly useful and well-documented virtual memorial on Find a Grave. It's called simply the Eastland Disaster Victims. And he did a very nice job assembling newspaper clippings and biographical information for both Ella and Florence. This gave me a useful place to begin. From there I created a family tree for the Reimys, and it was fairly easy to get their history once the tree was created. We'll begin with Ella Reamy, who died on the Eastland. Ella Goltz, G O E L Z Reamy was born in 1874 in New Jersey. She married Herman Reamy in 1894 in New Jersey, and they had Florence in 1896 and Arthur in 1900. When she died on the Eastland, Ella Goltzreamy was about forty one years old. Her daughter, Florence Reamy, was eighteen years old. How did this New Jersey family end up in Chicago? Fortunately for us, their friends threw them a going away party, and more fortunately, a newspaper wrote about it. This is from the North Hudson News, November eleventh, nineteen thirteen, two years before the Eastland disaster. Headline Visit Friends and Have Farewell Surprise. Coming to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Broton to spend the evening, Mr. and Mrs. Herman Reamy of 139 Morgan Street, Union Hill were pleasantly surprised last night. They found a number of their friends gathering at the Broton house, waiting to shout surprise at them. In the traditional manner, the Reemies were ushered into the reception room along with their daughter, and the crowd pounced upon them. The pair were presented with a huge bouquet of chrysanthemums by the assembled guests. The party was more of a farewell affair, for Mr. and Mrs. Reamy and daughter are to leave for Chicago on Wednesday, November 19th. They will reside there permanently. Despite the sad anticipation of farewells that were to come, all hands spent a pleasant evening. The luncheon was served at eleven. Miss Florence Reamy, Helen Yopst, Charles Shug, and Master George Broten rendered piano selections. Mr. and Mrs. Reamy are well known socially in North Hudson. He is connected with a large electrical concern in New York and is to be transferred to its Chicago offices. End of article. So there it is. We know who the family was. They were much loved, apparently, and we know how they got to Chicago. And now there's another article from the Jersey Observer and Jersey Journal, july twenty ninth, nineteen fifteen. Funeral of Eastland victims arranged. The bodies of Mrs. Ella Reamy and daughter, the local people who were drowned in the Eastland disaster in Chicago, have been brought here, and the funeral will be held tomorrow. Herman Reamy, the bereaved husband and father, is also here from the West. Services will be held at the late home of the deceased, Hudson Avenue and Morgan Street, Union Hill, by the American Flag Council, Daughters of Liberty, of which Mrs. Reamy was a member. Arrangements have been made to hold the funeral tomorrow afternoon at 2.30 at Grove Reformed Church, North Bergen. The Reverend I. W. Gowan will officiate. The interment will be in Grove Church Cemetery. The bodies were brought in via the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Undertaker Sharp brought them from the depot to the house. Mrs. Reamy's maiden name was Golt. She was in her 41st year. Her daughter Florence was 18. End of article. So again, we've got detailed biographies of these women and the family's relationship to each other. In fact, as a fairly experienced researcher of the people of the Eastland disaster, I have to say that this family was very well documented from the article about their going away party to this very well detailed death notice for both Ella and her daughter Florence. And it also mentions the dad and husband, Herman. So how did the Eastland disaster affect not just Chicago, but Hoboken, New Jersey? We get an idea from this death notice. And there's also another question that has to be asked. How did the biographical information for Ella and Florence get so distorted
as time passed? I'll explain. So I did additional searches to see if there was any updated information online for this family. And what I can say is Houston, we have a problem, or maybe Chicago, we have a problem. There's one list where all three reemes appear, but they're listed separately, with no connection made among them. None of the three have biographical information, and the small bit of information that is available does not have any footnotes or source citations. And the information for all three of these people is inaccurate, to put it mildly. First, Ella Remy is listed as single and twenty seven years old. She was the forty-one-year-old wife of Herman and mother of Florence Reamy, who also died. Florence Remy is correctly identified as single, but her age is listed as nineteen. She was eighteen years old. And then Herman Remy, the husband of Ella, the father of Florence, the Chicago transplant from New Jersey, his status is unsubstantiated. Well speaking of unsubstantiated, this entire list of Eastland people is for the most part unsubstantiated, meaning that there is no indication where these names came from. Now in the case of the Remy family, there are even more problems here. If we look at this list of each individual, number one, there's bare bones information, no footnotes, no source citations. The information that is available is inaccurate, and there's no indication that these people are related to each other if we take this list at face value. And we would leave with the impression that there's no biographical information available, and nothing could be farther from the truth. This is not a one-off situation, by the way, it's fairly typical, and that's one of the ongoing challenges of recovering and restoring the biographical information for each person associated with the Eastland disaster. So at the beginning of this episode, we talked about lineage societies and the danger of allowing an unsourced list of names to function as though it were some kind of registry of belonging. I hope you understand now, given this example of the Remy family, how the actual history can get lost if we don't stop to question what it is we are seeing. The Eastland disaster was a historical event. People don't become part of that event because some gatekeeper admits them to a list, and they don't cease to be part of it because they've been left off that list. Please know that. What we need to pay attention to are all kinds of records and research. Yes, they contradict each other and welcome to historical research. That's not a reason to ignore them or to pick the version we like the best and move on. The contradictions are part of the research, and prioritizing and sorting them out and correcting them is part of our ongoing job. When we look at primary sources or sources as close to the event as we can get, including these contemporary newspaper accounts, we also look at birth and death records, and we look at census records, court records, church records and even insurance records, whatever survives. And we also take a look at what the families themselves said and documented. And personally, since the Remy family is part of my extended Eastland network, my Eastland family really, I treat them with the same respect and thoroughness that I've given to my own family's history. That should go without saying. And that's what I expect from anyone who takes on this history as a formal project. If someone is going to claim some kind of authority over it, then they must demonstrate that they're up to the responsibility that comes with that authority. Well, I hope you enjoyed going through this historical analysis with me. What still astonishes me after all this time is that so much accurate information about the Remy family is readily and easily available. It's in old newspapers, some of it is on Find a Grave, some of it has been captured in my podcast and on my website for a few years now. And when I did a simple search for Florence Remy Eastland Disaster, guess what turned up? A photo of Florence taken as a child. The date is 1899, and this is now available through the Digital Public Library of America. I shared that photograph two years ago, and I'll share it again with the promotional video for this episode, because I think repetition may explain a great deal of what has happened here. Incorrect information has been repeated so often and copied from one place to the other that eventually it begins to look like it's established simply because we've seen it and heard it so many times. So I'm thinking that repetition can work in the other direction as well. Repeat the documented names with source citations and with footnotes. Share the newspaper articles. Repeat the correct names and relationships. Share the photographs again and again as they say rinse, lather, and repeat. Repeat enough so the verified information is in circulation. And perhaps at some point these errors that have hurt this history are no longer the first thing people refer to. And we correct the disinformation, the misinformation simply by pointing people to the evidence and letting the voices of the departed of the Eastland disaster speak for themselves. And you better believe that we will continue next week with more stories because there are so many stories waiting to be told. But in the meantime, please take care of yourselves. Do take care of each other. Stay safe, and I'll 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.flowerinther.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 1915. Goodbye for now.
