"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.
In the days after the Eastland disaster, a little girl in Waukegan read about a boy she had never met—and could not stop thinking about him.
Her name was Anastasia Holmes. The boy was Willie Novotny, the “little feller” whose story appeared in the newspaper after his death. Anastasia was so deeply affected by what she read that she could not sleep. Finally, her mother agreed to take her by train from Waukegan to Chicago so Anastasia could attend Willie’s funeral and place a flower on his coffin.
It is a small story beside the enormous scale of the Eastland disaster, but that is exactly why it is so powerful.
In this episode, I follow Anastasia’s journey through a remarkable July 31, 1915, article in the Waukegan Daily Sun and look more closely at the family behind the little girl who carried that flower. I also explore the kind of intimate reporting that preserved moments like this—moments that can disappear when history is reduced to totals, summaries, and familiar retellings.
Anastasia never knew Willie, but from that day onward, his story became part of her life.
And more than a century later, this lost story is restored. Anastasia's response to a child she never met gives us another way into the Eastland story: not through a number, but through one child reaching toward another.
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 187 of Flower in the River. And as always, I really hope you're doing well. As I was putting this week's episode together, I realized that this will probably be the last time for a while, just for a while, that I talk about the Joaquin stories. Not because there are so few of them, but because there are so many. And here's the
remarkable thing. I've been working with just three editions of the Waukegan Daily Sun. July 26th, July 28th, and July 31, 1915. These newspapers alone are packed with stories connected to the Eastland disaster. You've heard a few of them, but there are many, many more. And I will get to them, but I want to balance things out with some of the other stories that have been waiting around for a while. As of October 2026, which is when I'm recording this episode, these stories from Waukegan, like so many other stories related to the Eastland disaster, have been sitting there for 111 years, waiting to be picked up and brought forward. If someone has done that elsewhere, I have not seen it. And today I'm going to introduce you to someone who may be one of the most memorable people we've met in a while. And she was just a kid, a child. But before we meet her, it is time for a quick genealogy public service announcement.
I listen to genealogy podcasts, watch genealogy videos, and read genealogist website blog posts every week. You can say I love genealogy. But that's also how I keep up with what's going on because there is always something going on. In the last couple of weeks, several very well-known genealogists have been raising concerns about something happening, particularly on Find a Grave, where people are posting AI altered photographs of the departed. And I'm not talking about repaired photographs like we would do in the old days of Photoshop, but I'm talking about photographs that don't even resemble the original ones. Find a Grave does indeed have guidelines concerning AI, but it's still a crowdsourced site. What I've seen in the last few years is that much of the time these crowdsourced platforms do a better job at documentation than the so-called official platforms. Still, it depends heavily on contributors being careful and conscientious about what they post. But this past week, a professional genealogist described what happened to photographs of her very own grandparents. Someone significantly altered those photographs using AI and posted the altered versions and apparently didn't get the memo that they ought to remove those. This situation is still unfolding, by the way, but I hope that the genealogist can get this resolved. Technology in general can be used for good purposes or not so good purposes. For example, when it comes to the people of the Eastland disaster, we do have an additional problem. Until now, I have been recommending Find a Grave as one of the better places to find profiles of individual Eastland victims. Many of the contributors, particularly the early contributors there, have done excellent work. They seem to really care about these people. And the majority of these contributors add source citations. I have recommended Find a Grave in the past because the profiles for the Eastland victims generally are much better documented than what you will find on certain platforms devoted specifically to the Eastland disaster. But I need to update my recommendation for using Find a Grave for locating Eastland disaster victims. Over the past month, I've noticed a newer contributor adding photographs to Eastland memorials that appear to have been taken from a website that does not provide provenance for many of its photographs. Provenance means they tell you where they got the photograph from, who donated it, who the photograph is, etc. That compounds the problem that is already in place with the Eastland disaster. If a website posts a photograph without explaining where that photograph came from, and someone copies that photograph onto a platform like Find a Grave, the second posting does not somehow make the photograph better documented. In other words, we have proliferated disinformation because we still don't know where that original photograph came from. We don't know how the identification was established. We don't know the chain of custody, and we have to know that in genealogy. In fact, people like Krista Cowen and Lisa Louise Cook have been talking a lot lately in their videos about the importance of the genealogical proof standard and specifically source citation. So that's one issue with the photographs. But the same principle applies to written information. If the point of origin doesn't tell you where a claim came from, copying it to another website and then another one doesn't turn it into evidence. It creates more copies of an unsupported claim. And I have seen quite a bit of that. I actually hope that there'll be a time that I won't have to keep bringing this up, but I don't see this changing any time in the future. So the only thing we can do is be more informed. As we peruse these different organizations, websites, and so on, it's important to keep in mind that just because something sounds authoritative, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are. Simple test for that, can they back up their claims with actual proof? If they cannot, move on. Speaking of moving on, let's move on to today's
This article is from the Waukegan Daily Sun. The date is Saturday, july thirty first, nineteen fifteen, so just one week after the Eastland disaster. Headline Girl Sheds Tears Over Beer, that's B-I-E-R, of the Little Feller. Prayer answered when mother takes flaxen haired girl to funeral service. Little girl has had many wakeful nights since reading of the terrible tragedy. All the heaped up grief that has choked the hearts of a little flaxen-haired Waukegan girl of ten years and her baby brother is to be poured forth over the body of a quote-unquote little boy, better known as the quote, little feller, number 396, end quote, the Eastland waif who drowned in the overturning of the Eastland. The little girl's prayer has been answered. Her mama has consented to take her to Chicago today to attend the funeral of the little feller. At noon today, Mrs. L. C. Holmes of 220 Butrick Street, with her 10-year-old girl Anastasia, holding one of her hands, and her six-year-old boy holding the other, boarded a northwestern train en route to attend the funeral. The little girl was too shocked to mourn for a thousand dead. Her heart, big as it is, is not big enough to grasp the true meaning of the horrible disaster. But it is safe to say that the little tot could not have shed more tears or spent more wakeful nights had one of her own family met death. In her sleep, at the dinner table, at night, when she knelt down at her mother's knees to say her, Now I lay me down to sleep, prayer, the little girl's plea was, Mama, I want to place a flower on the little boy's coffin. I want to go to the funeral. Chicago and Walkegan went through the horror with dry eyes and aching hearts. Today, however, the floodgates were burst, and the tears rained down when the story of the little feller was told. The services will be held at the Bohemian School Hall, West 26th Street, and Homan Avenue, not far from the little red schoolhouse where the Novotney family resided. This is to be a funeral of children, for the children who died on the Eastland, for all the little fellers who will scamper about the neighborhood no more. He came with his arms full of roses, lilies, and asters, and graceful ferns waved about him. The little feller's homecoming was as best it could be in the circumstances. The family circle consisted of three corpses, cold and stark, and they lay in John Trosca's morgue, just around the corner from the Bohemian School at 26th Street and Homan Avenue. At the end of the row, they laid the body of the little feller, and the mountain of flowers that Chicago dropped on his beer were strewn tenderly about all four of them. Late yesterday afternoon, the little feller was found by his own grandmother, a tiny, aged Bohemian woman. She brought along his pair of pants and matched them with the little brown knickerbockers that lay huddled at the boy's feet. She peered into that childish, upturned face and then fainted, dead away. The boy is Willie Nivotny, and he was seven years old. Father, mother, and sister Mamie were all drowned on the ship, they are beginning to say was as safe and steady as a roller skating rink, and that's why no one came to identify the little feller, for there was no one left but the grandmother, and she is very, very old. In the meantime, the little feller snuggled close to the heart of the city. Even though he was dead, the city would have him be an orphan, and the city mothered the little drowned wave of the Eastland until his own mother was found, drowned also in that rush of brown water into the spite boat's hold. Stunned, horrified, shaken, but dry eyed before the spectacle of a thousand drowned, thousands shed their first tears when they read the story of the little lost boy and his jackknife and his well scuffed sneakers. Flowers came drifting down on the tiny form in the cheerless morgue, and the voice of the city in agony became soft and tender as it called to the little feller and bade him be lonely no longer. Today the appeal of the little feller continued to swell greater and greater. The flowers continued to come. A great starry flag was carried to the morgue to be wrapped around the boy's beer. That's the end of this article.
You heard the term beer B I E R throughout this article. You probably understood what it was by the context in which it was presented, but just in case, a beer is a movable frame, stand or platform used to support a corpse or coffin during a funeral service, a viewing, or a procession. That's from Wikipedia.
And I'm so grateful I stumbled across the Joaquin newspaper in the first place because the stories in it are astonishing. And it's not that this newspaper always got everything right, it didn't. But there's an intimacy to these stories. There's a vitality about them. And it feels as if these people, meaning the reporters and the people they interviewed, knew one another very well, and they probably did. So Joaquin is north of Chicago about 37 miles, and Chicago, as we know, was a big city then just as it is now. And did those Chicago reporters necessarily have some kind of connection with every family they covered? Most likely they did not, with maybe one or two exceptions. But the Waukegan paper, this feels different. Reading this article about this little girl, I have the feeling that the reporter knew this family, or at least knew something about them. And that gives us another facet of the Eastland disaster. How did people experience this tragedy from a distance? How did reading about it affect them? And particularly, how did the story of Willie Novotny affect a child close to Willie's own age? Well, we have something of an answer here. On July 31,
1915, the Swaukegan newspaper told the story of one child and her family and how they were affected by the story. They reported that 10-year-old Anastasia Holmes. And I need to mention that I did the family treat and she was actually 12 years old. And Anastasia was the daughter of Anna Aloysius Gallery, who was born in Anistamon, County Clare, Ireland, and Leroy Charles Holmes, born in Waukegan, Illinois. She had a younger brother called James Arnold Holmes. And as we saw, Anastasia was deeply affected by the story of the little feller, who was eventually identified as Willie or Willem Novotney. The Novotney family story has been well covered, fortunately, and I've even talked about it on the podcast. Anastasia Holmes, like the adults around her, was aware of the Eastland disaster, and she read all about it, and it seems that Anastasia found herself drawn into the story of a little boy she didn't know but could suddenly imagine. She cried. She lost sleep, and she repeatedly asked her mother to take her to Chicago so she could place a flower on his coffin and attend his funeral. Eventually, Anastasia's persistence won out. On the day of the funeral, Anna Holmes boarded a northwestern train for Chicago with Anastasia along with Anastasia's younger brother. And the reporter makes a remarkable observation about this little girl. She could not really comprehend a scale of a thousand dead, which is the number that they were reporting sometimes in the paper back then, but she could understand and
relate to the death of one child. That reporter writing over a hundred and eleven years ago is echoing something I have said again and again, and maybe way too much during the three plus years of this podcast. And that is introducing people to the story of the Eastland disaster by first mentioning the death toll does not create a bridge. Even if that number was historically substantiated and it is not, the number itself does not bring us closer to those people or to what happened. An individual story does that. We are wired for stories. A number can tell us a scale and we can walk away from that very quickly. But Anastasia could not walk away from the story of Willie Novotney. It became part of her waking hours and maybe her sleeping hours as well. I have to give this little girl credit. She did more than just feel sad. I don't want to call her sensitive because we sometimes use that word in a way that makes sensitivity sound like fragility. And there's nothing, and I repeat, nothing fragile about what Anastasia did. She was twelve years old. She read about a child she had never met. She was affected by the story. She cried for him. She lost sleep over him. She probably, like me, drove her family nuts. But then she insisted on doing something. She wanted to pick up go from Joaquin to Chicago. She wanted to engage in the physical act of bringing Willie Novotny a flower. She wanted to be there. That took compassion. Of course it took compassion. But it also took courage. Courage was the thing that motivated her to get up and move and do something. And I'm guessing it took a healthy amount of stubbornness as well. Anastasia was not going to let it go. And I have to say, from these many years later, Anastasia's story deeply inspires me. Not that I need any motivation, but it's so uplifting to read about a twelve-year-old doing what adults sometimes don't do. Hmm. So for me, Anastasia Holmes, later Anastasia Campbell, her married name, she's a hero. And for the record, I want to reiterate that Anastasia Holmes and her family do not appear in the modern versions of the Eastland story. Now Anastasia and her husband stayed in the Chicago area. He passed away in the 1950s. Anastasia passed away in the 1980s. They had a number of children, most of whom recently died. And because of privacy concerns, I'm going to keep the story focused on Anastasia and not give too many details because I do want to respect her family's privacy. She has a number of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, probably great great-grandchildren by now. And I'm wondering if any of these people know about Anastasia's action during the Eastland disaster. If not, I know the power of publishing. And having been contacted by a number of other Eastland family members during the last three years, I do hope that this family too, if they are looking, that they will find this story of their ancestor, their relative, and feel very proud of her.
So next week we will not return to Waukek, and we'll get back at some point. But I want to branch out a bit and tell some other stories that have also been waiting in the wings. In the meantime, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and stay safe. I'll talk to you next week.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.
