Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

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Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Natalie Zett

148 episodes

4 days ago

Send us a text A single number can shape how we remember—until new evidence asks us to look again. This episode takes you inside another year of research on the people of the Eastland disaster, where a repeated death toll gives way to an evolving, documented estimate. I share how two overlooked victims surfaced through archival work, and why adding their names is crucial for families, historians, and anyone who believes facts should lead the story—not follow it. This journey isn't just archiv...

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Religion & Spirituality,

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Send us a text A single number can shape how we remember—until new evidence asks us to look again. This episode takes you inside another year of research on the people of the Eastland disaster, where a repeated death toll gives way to an evolving, documented estimate. I share how two overlooked victims surfaced through archival work, and why adding their names is crucial for families, historians, and anyone who believes facts should lead the story—not follow it. This journey isn't just archiv...

Show more...

Religion & Spirituality,

Episodes (20/148)

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

The Search Goes On — Coincidence. Clarity. Resolve.

Send us a text A single number can shape how we remember—until new evidence asks us to look again. This episode takes you inside another year of research on the people of the Eastland disaster, where a repeated death toll gives way to an evolving, documented estimate. I share how two overlooked victims surfaced through archival work, and why adding their names is crucial for families, historians, and anyone who believes facts should lead the story—not follow it. This journey isn't just archiv...

6 days ago

30 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Pages, Faces, and Names Restored - A Czech Eastland Breakthrough

Send us a text In this episode, we return to Chicago's Czech community and uncover something extraordinary: an original 1916 Czech-language publication that didn't just tell the story of the Eastland disaster—it preserved more than 100 photographs of Czech women, men and children who lost their lives during the Eastland Disaster. Many of these photos haven't been seen since the article was published in 1916. You'll hear how finding this rare primary source adds depth, texture, and nuanc...

1 week ago

28 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

One Family, Two Losses, and a Voice That Went On

Send us a text A century-old trade journal shouldn’t be the most gripping thing you’ll hear about this week, but here we are: a 1915 issue of The American Lumberman unlocks the intertwined stories of Chicago’s Czech community in the aftermath of the Eastland disaster. We trace a death notice—Julia Kolar—through a maze of addresses, parish ties, and workplace notes. We then follow the thread to meet another victim, Anna Molitor Kolar, and a survivor, Ellla Kolar, whose voice would carry from C...

2 weeks ago

40 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

The River Remained in Her Bones: A Recovered Eastland Story

Send us a text The River Remained in Her Bones: A Recovered Eastland Story A single line in a 1922 obituary can change the shape of history. We follow that thread to Chrissie McNeal Lauritzen, who survived the SS Eastland capsizing by clinging to the overturned hull, “was never well since,” and died seven years later from complications tied directly to that morning on the Chicago River. This isn’t just a moving story; it’s documented evidence that challenges the fixed perception of the ...

3 weeks ago

33 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

A Hero at the Porthole: The Rabe Family’s Story

Send us a text A forgotten headline. A crowded dock. A father who turns back to a sinking ship and pulls a family friend through a porthole. In this episode, we follow the Rabe family—Fred, Delia, Grace, and Kenneth—from a terrifying morning on the Chicago River into the decades that followed, when work, service, and community stitched their lives into something livable again. We open the archive, and listen as Grace and Kenneth share their memories of that day, 84 years later. Grace becomes ...

1 month ago

31 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Fissures in the Archive: Behind the Curtain of the Eastland Disaster

Send us a text Some histories don’t fracture because records vanished; they fracture because we stopped asking questions. In this episode, we look at the Eastland Disaster through a different lens — not just what happened in 1915, but how its story has been curated, simplified, and sometimes commercialized, and how we can repair and restore it with evidence. I share what two years of deep research (and new academic work) revealed: there’s no agreed standard for who qualifies as an Eastland vi...

1 month ago

33 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Capsized. Kicked. Survived.

Send us a text A photographer’s byline led me straight into another long-overlooked Eastland story — the 1965 Chicago Tribune interview with survivor Anna Meinert, one of the many accounts from this event that were well documented but seldom researched and carried forward. Anna’s memories bring the morning of July 24, 1915 into sharp, human focus. Fifty years later she could still see it all: water seeping from portholes, the sudden lurch, the scrap of canvas above a window, a stranger’s boot...

1 month ago

28 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

The Rosetta Stone of the Eastland Disaster

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

1 month ago

44 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

She Stayed on the Line: From the Eastland Disaster to the Front Lines of France

Send us a text Sirens, floodwater, shattering glass, and a calm voice saying, “Just a moment, please.” We revisit the women who turned raw noise into order—telephone operators whose steady hands and quick minds kept cities connected and, in wartime, helped save lives on the front lines. We start in Chicago with the Eastland disaster and widen the lens to the “Hello Girls,” the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit. These bilingual women carried commands across the trenches, cut confus...

2 months ago

38 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

The Afterlife of a Story

Send us a text What happens when the storyteller is gone—but the story keeps rewriting itself? A single family biography can carry the weight of a neighborhood’s memory. We open the archives on a 20-year-old Western Electric employee who boarded the Eastland with her fiancé in 1915—and trace how her story, first written by a family member, nearly disappeared under paraphrase and missing attribution. What begins as a personal account of loss becomes a blueprint for preserving authorship, prove...

2 months ago

34 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

From Sea to City: A Mariner’s Journey into Chicago’s Past

Send us a text A city comes alive when you can stand on a corner and glimpse yesterday behind today’s skyline. That’s the spark behind my conversation with Ryan Wilson, a designer and mariner who turned countless hours in archives into the Chicago History Map—a large-format, interactive portal where high-resolution photos meet precise locations and time fades just enough for details to surface. We talk about the winding path that led from Admiralty charts on private yachts to digitized stree...

2 months ago

42 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

The Eastland Survivors and the Case of the Missing Bylines

Send us a text Memory can vanish quietly—sometimes with a server shutdown. This week, we open the door to the Eastland disaster’s online past: from an early researcher’s dial-up “postcard pages” to an early Eastland website’s now-defunct archive. We trace how those pioneering digital efforts shaped what many of us think we know today. Along the way, we revisit transportation historian George Hilton’s foundational work—his flexible approach to casualty counts and the permissions that seeded th...

2 months ago

34 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Excursion to Death — The Witness Who Finally Spoke

Send us a text A tug’s line goes taut, a mandolin stops mid-note, and a sleek steamer rolls onto its side in six minutes. That’s the scene an eight-year-old John Griggs never forgot—and the memory he later captured in a gripping article, “Excursion to Death,” lost for decades and now brought back to light. We trace the morning’s small warnings at the dock, the sudden tilt that turned joy into panic, and the eerie contrast of the Eastland disaster unfolding within sight of Chicago’s bridges an...

3 months ago

29 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Visiting Every Grave - George Hilton’s Eastland Legacy

Send us a text A century after his birth, George W. Hilton is still guiding our footsteps. This episode honors the transportation historian whose book Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic became the cornerstone of Eastland disaster research. After discovering my own family connection to the Eastland Disaster, Hilton’s work became my north star. What begins with grief — and a surprise manuscript from a relative — unfolds into a story about how scholarship, storytelling, and stubborn love for truth ...

3 months ago

39 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Buried by Omission: The Eastland Victim Who Disappeared

Send us a text This week we take a deeper dive into the Claims and Libels files (In the Matter of the Petition of St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company, Owner of the Steamer Eastland, For Limitation of Liability) preserved in the National Archives Catalog. The research revealed a startling omission — a victim missing from the original compilation of Eastland victims and from most later derivative lists (with one exception!) By cross-checking court filings, obituaries, and family connections, I...

3 months ago

34 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

True Tales from the Eastland: Admiral Rickover Remembers, Survivors Battle for Redress

Send us a text Admiral Hyman Rickover—father of the nuclear navy and one of the most influential military figures of the 20th century—had a connection to the 1915 Eastland disaster that’s been virtually forgotten. As a 15-year-old Western Union messenger in Chicago, young Rickover delivered telegrams to grieving families throughout the night following the tragedy. What haunted him most? The undertakers who swarmed the scene, exploiting grief-stricken families for profit. “Where money is invol...

3 months ago

39 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Shoeless in Chicago: A Rusyn Teen Hero of the Eastland

Send us a text At just 17 years old, Peter Hardy stood on a Chicago bridge in 1915, watching the Eastland fill with happy Western Electric employees on their way to a summer picnic. Moments later, the ship rolled onto its side, plunging more than 800 people to their deaths. Peter didn’t run. This Rusyn immigrant teenager dove straight into the polluted Chicago River and began hauling people out — families clinging together, strangers fighting for breath. He saved at least ten lives that morni...

3 months ago

36 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Erased by a Typo — Meet the Man Who Saved Lives and Legacies

Send us a text In this episode, I return to Dwight Boyer’s "True Tales of the Great Lakes" and discuss two forgotten heroes of the 1915 Eastland disaster—one remembered correctly, the other erased for more than a century by a newspaper typo that turned my fact-check into a full-blown genealogical detective story. The Mystery Begins While researching Boyer's account of the disaster, I encountered two names that appeared nowhere else in most modern Eastland documentation: N.W. LeVally, an...

4 months ago

40 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Honeymoon Interrupted: The Groom Says "I Do" to Disaster

Send us a text Hidden stories have a way of finding the light. In this fascinating deep dive, we uncover two previously unknown documents that reshape our understanding of the 1915 Eastland disaster that claimed over 800 lives in the Chicago River. The first discovery reveals how the tragedy transformed American journalism. Through a December 1915 Associated Press Service Bulletin, we glimpse the behind-the-scenes response of the nation's leading news agency and hear the voices of newspaper ...

4 months ago

25 minutes

Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

The Sleepyhead Who Dodged Death - Another Untold Eastland Story

Send us a text Three young engineers fresh out of Cornell University were running late to the Western Electric company picnic on July 24, 1915. One had overslept, making the trio miss their train and arrive at the Chicago River docks just as their coworkers were boarding the SS Eastland. Redirected to a secondary boat due to overcrowding, they stood on a bridge and watched in horror as the Eastland slowly tilted, then capsized in the shallow water, trapping hundreds inside. Their tardiness ha...

4 months ago

27 minutes