Memory Keepers: Honoring The Forgotten
In this episode, Natalie Zett shares a riveting narrative where her role as storyteller becomes a conduit for the voices that time almost silenced. She scours ethnic and neighborhood newspapers from long ago, offering an intimate look into the lives of immigrant families. She unravels the complexities of translating historical documents, revealing the rich, culturally diverse voices silenced by the Eastland Disaster and opens a window into 1915 Chicago.
Natalie's journey into her Eastern European heritage and the unique influence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire reveals how traditions and spirituality are woven into the fabric of history. In exploring bygone eras, we are reminded of the value that cultural practices hold in preserving our collective history. Her “Eastland Chronicles” serve as a tribute, highlighting how past experiences of our ancestors continue to reverberate in our present.
She underscores the importance of genealogical research and the enduring legacy we create as we pen the stories of our own lives – a journey every listener is invited to embark upon, ensuring the memories of yesteryear inform the identities of tomorrow.
Links
Flower In The River (audio Book)
Podcast Transcript
Pat
Filled To Capacity, where heart grit and irreverent humor collide. A podcast for people too stubborn to quit and too creative not to make a difference.
Pat
Hi, I am Pat Benincasa, and welcome back to Fill To Capacity. Today's episode, “Memory Keepers, Honoring The Forgotten.” My guest is Natalie Zett. Natalie wrote “Flower in the River, A Family Tale Finally Told.” It is a compelling story that traces the impact of the 1915 Eastland Disaster on the Pfeiffer family, spanning four generations. The story focuses on Martha Pfeiffer, who at 19 perished in the tragedy and her great niece, Zara Vrabel, who then uncovers the family's past and grapples with its legacy.
In addition to the book, Natalie created a website with blog photos, historical records, archive, newspaper articles about the Eastland disaster. Natalie then recorded an audio version of the book, and this is where her theater and acting background really kicked in! After releasing the book, she would often joke; “One and done!” The book was out in print and audio. So that's that. Next came “Flower in the River Podcast,” a weekly podcast that talks about how a family story along with an epic tragedy were lost, found, and brought to life.
What happened next was totally unexpected, but when the dead talk you pay attention. Welcome Natalie. Nice to have you back.
Natalie
Oh, that's enough of an introduction. Whoa. Thank you.
Pat
Before we begin, for those listeners who might not know, would you just give us a brief explanation of the Eastland Disaster?
Natalie
Sure. In Chicago, at the turn of the century, there was a big company, kind of like Silicon Valley, if you want to envision that. And the company was called Western Electric, and it had all kinds of like sub industries, like communications, wires, all kinds of things that, beyond my knowledge, to be honest with you. But it was all about communication, telephones. And then if you look at old movies, you'll see Western Electric under the sound. So it had a lot of influence and it had a massive facility in Cicero, Illinois, which is just outside of Chicago, and I believe it's been absorbed into Chicago at this point. But it was a self-contained, basically city within a city where the company itself had its own hospital, very active employee organization where they did everything from social events to schooling, to integration of, 'cause we had so many people who came from other countries at that point trying to fit into Chicago, work together, learning how to live peacefully with each other.
Natalie
It was a major employer. And every year they had a company picnic where they would charter ships. And for those who don't know Chicago, what they would do is they would go down and there were some docks in the Chicago River, they would load the people up and then they would take them across Lake Michigan, which is kind of like an ocean, a tiny ocean.
So if you think of lake, you're not thinking of the backyard pond. This thing is treacherous. It's huge. I've gone across it. It's formidable. And they were going to go to a picnic area in Indiana called the Indiana Dunes, Michigan City, and have some fun and for the day, you know, just a relief from their seven, eight-day work life. All they did was work. 'cause these were mostly immigrants or first-generation people, and very few of them were.
Natalie
Um, what you would consider them all working class.There were a handful, as I'm finding out that were of the other class. But for the most part, that was the population.
But what happened in July is the first ship that they had chartered, which already had a bad reputation for listing, which meant that when it was had people on it, it would go to one side, go to the other side, whatever that's listing the thing. It totally keeled over. And there were about 2,500 people aboard. All of them went into the water or they were crushed beneath. So out of that 2,500 approximately, 'cause it's always approximate, over 800 were killed, including my grandmother's youngest sister who shouldn't have even been on that thing because my grandmother was the Western Electric employee. She was pregnant. She gave her little sister the tickets thinking, you know, she just broke up with her boyfriend. This be a chance to have some fun. So Martha, my aunt Martha and her girlfriend went on this ship and they never, they, they didn't get out alive as so many people did not. And so it was largely forgotten after that.
Pat
Natalie, it seems that this maritime disaster that forever affected your family opened a doorway to people who were forgotten their stories untold. What are the Eastland Chronicles?
Natalie
They were an accident as, as I think Bob Ross would say, a happy little disaster accident. So just for a background for people, I did start doing a blog and then a podcast as I was narrating the book. I mean, I had the microphone right, and I wanted to do something with it, but really the book narration, I was new to book narration and it's very, very picky and specific. And I even had a professional actor person who could not manage it. That's how difficult it was. And so I had to figure out how to do this, and I needed something to not to make me less crazy as, as I went, as I was in the midst of doing this. So I thought, let's just, 'cause I was already on a ton of podcasts the previous year when the book came out, I thought, let's answer some of those questions.
Natalie
And then since some of the podcasters, they were really nice, but they weren't professional interviewers. And I am a professional journalist with 40 plus year’s experience doing this, I thought, I'm gonna ask myself the questions that I wish people would've asked me. And I'm also going to answer some of the questions that others have asked me of my readers and people like this. I was reading from the book and answering questions and grooving along. And then in November, 2023, I was looking on eBay. If people do genealogy, if any of you're interested in family history, there is no better place than eBay because sometimes you can get really lucky in terms of finding stuff. I was looking up Eastland, and I saw this book that was available for 75 bucks, and it was about a court trial of some sort that had happened about 15 years after the Eastland disaster.
Natalie
Some families filed some kind of lawsuit. The claim was going to be heard. I really don't remember the details about it, but I thought 75 bucks. No way. And then I went to Google Books and I saw the same book available for free. So I thought I wanted to just share with the audience. 'cause a lot of what my podcast is about is not just about my book, it's about genealogy. And part of doing genealogy is learning.
Where can you go to get free sources, like HathiTrust, Google Books, et cetera, chronicling America. So I wanted to talk about that. But as I was reading the story of this court case, the names that came up of two brothers who were killed, I'd seen in my own family tree. And I thought, wait a minute, am I related to these guys as well? It looks like I am, but I cannot figure out the common ancestor that we share.
Natalie
But when I started reading about them, I thought, this is an intriguing story. Two brothers killed, one brother was married with some children, the other brother was engaged. The fellow who was engaged, his fiancé got out. And the guy who died, his family did not go because they had a little baby at home and his wife wanted to stay with the baby and children. I was not just wondering about these people to whom I appear to be related. I thought, what the heck is their story? 'cause I've never heard about them. And what happens to the family afterward? It's not just a ship, you know, keeled over in the Chicago River. There are all these lives that were taken and affected forever. Not, not just mine. So I started talking about these people and then as I was researching these fellows, I saw other names and other names and other names, then I would go looking for them.
Natalie
Fortunately, I was able to find some information on Find a Grave. Now for people who don't know, find a grave is based in the US and it's crowdsourced and it's getting a lot better in terms of quality control. But somebody went ahead and put together the cemeteries and graves and stories of as many Eastland victims as they could and their families. So that was beautiful. I refer people to that all the time. If it's your family and you see inaccuracies, report 'em to find a grave and they'll take care of them. They're really good to work with. So, but I thought, why is this information not available? And I thought, Hmm. That was bugging me. And I thought, well, can I really make a one stop shopping experience for people with all these, you know, these dead people? It's like, oh my God, no.
Natalie
But I thought, but I can take one at a time and one at a time. So I did either one family or one community, or one person sometimes. And I thought, you know what, as they say, let it begin with me. And I think we get frustrated sometimes when we see things that lack in that we wanna correct. It's like, well, somebody should do something. It's like, maybe I'm the somebody who should do something. So, I thought, what the heck? I'm a very experienced genealogist at this point, and by experience I say that I've been doing this for seven or eight years very seriously sometimes for hire. And also too, I work with the best. I mean, I've, I've trained with the best. I've taken classes from the best. I've learned really good habits and methodologies and processes. I just came out of a long weekend, genealogy conference. I'm always learning. I thought I wanted to apply what I know to these lost people because again, these stories, once they're gone, that's it. They're getting lost to history. There's no single place that's really, outside of say Find A Grave that's really been telling the stories.
Pat
Natalie, what you're saying is you start finding these people and you keep finding more people. And all of a sudden you begin the Eastland Chronicles.
And for our listeners, I want you to know, on Natalie's website, there is a category called Discovery Hub. And if you click that, you go right to the Eastland Chronicles. So, you're finding these people, and these people are immigrant families, people from all sorts of different nations, different languages who are working at Western Electric. And so now you're not just dealing with finding them, these ethnic backgrounds come into play. So, I have a couple questions for you. Why do you tell their stories? And what in your background prepared you for this unending task?
Natalie
I don't know. I guess we're kind of, it's my... I was gonna make a joke about my family, but it's kind of like we're drawn to lost causes. We, we are a tragic family. We really are. I mean, I was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and what is Johnstown known for about the 1889 flood that killed lots of people. I was born into understanding tragedy. We used to play in Grandview Cemetery with all the unknown. I think there was 700 unknown graves, little white gravestones for people there. It's in my blood to know that this is a reality for some people. And also to the other thing that's in my blood as I come from a long line of storytellers and journalists. And also too, when I did my book on my, on my aunt, I thought, there's so much. I mean, I could have gone on for like an epic series on this thing because there's so much.
Natalie
And I thought... for people who probably don't know the story, I didn't find out about my aunt until I, about 25 years ago when my mother's oldest sister, who was a former reporter, my mother had an older, much older half-sister. She decided before she died, she was in her eighties to write a story of the family history. And she gave it to me because I was already writing and published, and I didn't know anything about these people. So, a lot of what I was doing as I was compiling what became this book was catching up. 'cause I had lost one quarter of my family history because I knew nothing about these people. It wasn't just learn about my aunt or my grandmother, my mother's mother, but where did they come from and who are they related to and all that sort of thing, and where did they work and all these types of things.
Natalie
As I built up their world, finished the book, got it out. And then I thought, what about the larger world in which they were living in Chicago at that time? How many different ethnic groups? And I knew of some of these because I mean, I read “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair in high school. I knew about the meat packing, the stockyards and that sort of thing, but I only knew it through that lens. So I needed to go back. And what I started to do is, because I have a background in systematic theology, my master's degree is in systematic theology. And what that involved is at Luther Seminary, learning all these ancient languages, going into these ancient, ancient texts and leaving my biases at the door as much as possible and trying to figure out, so what within this world did these texts mean?
Natalie
And it's if you think that's easy. It's a not, I mean, people have been arguing and fussing about that for a few thousand years. But it's good training for what I am doing now because I started translating Lithuanian papers. I started translating Polish papers that were published at the time of the Eastland disaster because I didn't want as much as possible. I didn't want to just say, well, you know, these people lost this person or whatever. What did the Polish communities, there's not just one community. What did the Polish communities have to say about this disaster? And I just started reporting on my podcast as I read it. Granted, it's a translation, but I do work with Polish and German translators regularly. I wish I had somebody who knows Lithuanian, if you known anybody, contact me. But I was able to figure out enough of what they were saying to get their own words.
Natalie
And I wanted their own words unbiased. Are they politically correct? Absolutely not. They say what they think. It's 1915, they came, all of our people came to the United States and Canada, north America for a better life. And it didn't work out that way for everybody. So how did they recover and how did they get support? And there was, as my aunt, my mother's oldest sister said, because I got so angry. I said, well, why didn't they do something? Why didn't they rebel? And she said, there were no workers' rights. She said, you don't understand. And when she said, you don't understand, it was like, I don't understand. Oh my God. And I thought, I'm bringing all my bias. I'm bringing my everything. I have to leave that at the door. And in a sense, start off tabular rasa, just blank slate almost. And see, okay, what is going on in this world? What are the laws? What rights? Women couldn't even vote at that point.
Pat
Okay, I wanna stop you there. And we're gonna come back to that. But there's a huge piece to the story that before we go any further, we really need to address, you have a rich family background. And as your dad said, quote,” It's in the blood.” You at times hear the dead or feel as though they are guiding you in finding people for the Eastland Chronicles. Will you talk about that?
Natalie
Well, my background, I was not very close to what I knew of my mother's family growing up, that we all came from Johnstown. And though the family left, my mom and dad left fairly early. We would go back all the time and spend time with her family, which honestly, I didn't like them very much. I just, ugh. It's funny. There's reasons for that that I found years later why I was very uncomfortable there. Beautiful mansion, 22 rooms, very wealthy. And I, I told my mom at one point, I couldn't have been any more than four years old. Get me out of here. Take me up to grandma's. That was my dad's mother. And she lived in a place where they didn't even have central heating. They had coal, a coal stove. And it was really impoverished compared to what my mother's people were living in.
Natalie
And that's where I wanted to be. And they were from what is now Slovakia, Eastern Slovakia. But at the, at the time was the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My dad's family, very much, a lot of them made their living by telling fortunes, by conducting seances, this type of thing. It was just what they did. And I accepted that's just what they did. My dad's people are primarily Carpatho Rusyn. That's an ethnic group, which you'll find in Slovakia. But if you know who Andy Warhol is, Andy Warhol was also Carpatho Rusyn, but also part Romani, which is sometimes called Gypsy. But the preferred term is Romani. And probably a few other things in there that I don't, I don't know as well as Ashkenazi Jewish back further in the lineage. But, so you have this mix of people, and we were already all over the place. And so I think what that did, it was more of my, my dad's family is also very creative.
Natalie
A lot of the folks, including my father, were and went into the entertainment field. So, or they were artists, or they were different types of, so they were kind of like people without boundaries, because again, where they came from had no boundaries. So, it was just like, yeah, they were for the most part, Roman Catholic or Byzantine Catholic. But that was kind of like, eh, you know, they had their own spin on it. They had a lot of, of, uh, I would say folk magic, folk wisdom. When I was with my grandmother and then visiting the other relatives on that side of the family, there was all kinds of stuff going on. And I just accepted the fact that the dead were just as much a part of our lives as the living relatives. And you could communicate with them. And the other thing I learned, but I wasn't taught this, it was just the way that I saw relatives conduct themselves.
Natalie
You treat them with respect and a little bit of fear too. So you don't treat them as if they're commodities or something to, I don't know, goof around with or whatever. Which I kind of tried to do when I was a kid. And I was reprimanded a few times for doing that. But it was like, you need to be respectful. And so, I didn't think much about that until, you know, many, many years later when I got this information about my aunt and Chicago. And when I started to research it, because I was already a journalist, I thought, this is just a research project. It's my history at school. Things started happening. Um, serendipitous events where I would, similar to, there's a book by a author and genealogist and actor Hank C Jones, where he talks about “psychic roots” in genealogy. Genealogists have this happen all the time.
Natalie
But I didn't know that at that point, which was good. For example, the first time I went to try to find my family's graves in Chicago, I'd never been to that cemetery, huge cemetery. And I thought, oh, what the hell did I do? Now I have my, I thought I'm not gonna be able to find these people. Long story short, I parked right in front of the graves, but I didn't realize it until I got out and walked around a little bit. So I was able to find whatever I needed on this trip. And I had to be, it was uncomfortable. It was weird. There were times where I felt like I'm not alone. At that point, I was living in a little one bedroom in the St. Paul, and I thought, why do I feel somebody else is here with me? I mean, there was just that sense of I was not alone in this world.
Natalie
And because I was paying attention to this side of the family, they were reciprocating. It's like, okay, I'm gonna introduce you to this group. And the other amazing finding from that document that my mother's sister gave me was I moved to Minneapolis- St. Paul to get away from my family for, for lack of a better way to describe it. I wanted to start a new where I knew no one, and I don't know anybody up here, well, I didn't know anybody up here. And I came up to Minneapolis St. Paul because the area felt like home. When I read that document and I saw the names of some of my ancestors, it finally dawned on me that my great-great-grandmother, and various ones of her children are buried about an hour and a half outside of where I moved. And I've been to that little, it's a little, little village called Fall Creek, Wisconsin.
Natalie
And I featured it. My, in my book, I called it Falling Brooks. Because I knew I'm related to these people and I'm, but I didn't want to be, I dunno, presumptuous. I wanted to make a fictionalized form of them because I did not grow up with them. And they're a very different culture than the one I grew up with. I mean, the town is a thousand people and it's always been about, about that. I thought, whoa. So, there was something in me that already was gravitating toward this story, I think. And when I was writing the book, I came up with all kinds of different phrases. You know, you feel poetic sometimes. And I thought, this disaster united, the whole bunch of us who experienced it in our families, it's like... a different kind of family one bound by this tragedy, not DNA.
Natalie
And so I felt, I wanna say an obligation, but that's not heavy. I felt like, hey, I can do this. I can tell a story. I can do genealogy. And I didn't want any of these people like my aunt to get lost. And so it was part of was, was driving me was that, and I thought our lives as working class people, as recent immigrants to this country, just because we didn't have the money doesn't mean our lives were not important. We, we contributed, we did all sorts of things. And I wanted us acknowledged, even if I can only find a sliver of information about a community, I'm gonna put it out there.
Pat
Beautifully said. Now I wanna go back to the Eastland Chronicles, 'cause I've listened to all of them. And one of the striking things about the Chronicles is that you let the dead speak for themselves and that you read from archived newspapers. You go into those newspapers, those articles, and you read the things that they wrote or things that were quoted from them directly or about them. How have their words impacted you?
Natalie
Well, I wanna step back because I realize, pat, I didn't define what the Eastland Chronicles are. They are a spinoff from my book. And it started with the finding of that $75 book that should have been available for free. But also what happened was, I was in the midst of reading the chapter in my book called Sketching and Unlived Life. And the verb sketching, the Jaron sketching was the thing I thought sketch the unlived lives, sketch these lives. That was the thing that started driving me toward this new offshoot, this new subcategory. And I thought, I gotta call it something because it's really not flower in the river. It's really not my story. But I thought, I call it the Eastland Chronicles. It seemed like a good name. And that's what that is. So the Chronicles are stories of all these other communities, families, individuals who lost their lives and or, and their families.
Natalie
What I started to do was, as a journalist, I always, always, always let my, unless I'm doing an opinion piece, otherwise I let my subject speak for themselves. And it's harder to do that when they've been dead this long. But what I have found by going to, into these obscure newspapers, not the Chicago Tribune, though, the Chicago Tribune is a wonderful paper, but I'm talking about these neighborhood papers, small publications out of ethnic communities like the Lietuva and Dziennik Chicagoski in the Polish community. Those little papers have a wealth of information. So I thought, but they're just sitting there. So I thought I'd bring them up and talk about them. And now they're out there into the universe and what's happening as a result of sharing these stories, I do, I let my listeners or readers, if they're reading the transcripts, judge for themselves. And I also always have to say, this is 1915 folks, not 2024. So leave your sensibilities and your, you know, whatever, whatever gets to you now, put that to one side and just listen to them as they speak to you.
Pat
Okay. I wanna stop you there, because now I wanna zero in on the fact that you spend hours, days researching newspaper articles Yes. Do from the early 20th century. And I have a few questions about that, Natalie, first off, what have these archived pages revealed to you about the everyday lives and struggles of people from the early 19 hundreds?
Natalie
Ironically, I mean, the, the time is different. The societal setups are different. They're not that different from now in terms of some of the other stuff that was going on around them in terms of worries about safety, worries about crime, public safety. One of the people that I profiled was the coroner who was on the scene, coroner, Pete Hoffman, who was quite the colorful character. And one of his relatives reached out to me a few weeks ago, and I had a little bit of correspondence with him. But Pete's thing was, he wanted to have public safety, so he kind of took charge of what was going on when the Eastland capsized. So we gotta set this up, we need to have a temporary morgue, we need to do this, that, and the other. So it's like, how did people spring into action in 1915? There was a photographer who I interviewed his great nephew a few months ago now, a Japanese American photographer called Jun Fujita.
Natalie
What his great nephew said is that Jun was always on the scene right before something happened, or right after it happened. It's almost like June had a psychic ability to show up. Like either it was the St. Valentine's Day massacre, 'cause he was there, he's a photographer that for that the Race Riot in 1919 or the Eastland disaster, he's there taking photos. And so there are these witnesses to this thing too. So it just showed me that what we think of now as communication was already going on back then, and the ability to get the news out there quickly, much quicker than you would've think would think. Also, the other thing that happened though, that we have to be aware of that I, that I have been cognizant of is the wild numbers of people that were reported dead anywhere from 2000 to 1500 to 1900 to 900 to whatever. So it's just like one of those types of things too. So when there's a catastrophe, whether the Johnstown flood or the Eastland disaster or anything, it takes a while to figure out who got killed in this thing.
Pat
Well, the point is, who died on the boat and who died of the boat? I mean, I'm sure there must be people in hospital. Did they find bodies later on? I mean, how do you have a fixed number? Can you have a fixed number on this?
Natalie
I would never put, I, I used to, 'cause I repeated a lot of what I learned, because again, when you're new to something, and we were just talking about this in one of the genealogy groups, you only know what you know at the time. And I too continue to learn. We all continue to learn. So there are things you get right away, things you miss. So I just repeated from, so-called, you know, people that, you know, they did, they did their work too. But with genealogy, I always say this, you're just one document away from being proven wrong about just about everything. And so you have to dispense with hubris. You have to realize, I mean, I always feel like uh oh, what am I gonna do this week? What, what am I gonna, you know, kind of, ugh, there is a fear, a good kind of fear that tells me it's just like, look, this is what I found.
Natalie
It's a sketch, blah blah. More information will be on the way. But in terms of trying to figure out or attach hard numbers, no more than they, they did that with the Johnstown flood. Would I do that with this? Only because already, I have found in these old newspapers, there was a body that was found floating down the river in September. The Eastland happened in July, 1915. And there's no follow up to this article, but they were trying to figure out was this one of the Eastland people.
There was a woman who was in the water. She survived, but about five years, she was never right after that. She was sick all the time. The Chicago River was filthy. And so they, they were trying to, um, I don't know how they inoculated people back then, I really don't know. But they were trying to deal with the, the illness of, you know, different types of diseases you could pick up from the river.
Natalie
So she was sick, sick, sick after that. And five years later she died. Her mother blamed it on the Eastland, but of course she couldn't prove it and no one would probably advocate for her. The point of those old newspapers. People were objecting to the narratives that were being forced on them. If you were of the working class, you would read, read papers, like the day book, the ones that were more corporately aligned, they would present a different story. You have to realize what is the source of this document. And I was just talking with the historian a few months ago, whose specialty is that, that time period. And she was saying, it all depends on what you're looking at, the story you get. Will you ever get a complete story, including numbers? I don't think so. If you do, then what is the criterion?
Natalie
How are you deciding that? Again, for our Johnstown flood, we have an approximate number because they were finding bodies that had, this was, this happened where it went down the, um, the side of a, of a mountain basically, and just kind of kept going down the Conemaugh River and, and just kept going and going because it was, it was so forceful, it just destroyed the whole town. And that's how fearsome a flood can be an actual flood flood. And so they were finding bodies along like, I guess a few years after the flood. So will they ever find the complete number? No, but as this historian said to me, she said, I'm not sure that that's that important. She said, what is important are the stories.
Pat
Yeah. I have to ask this. What is the most unexpected story or piece of information you uncovered in your newspaper research?
Natalie
It seems like they all are. Pat. I mean, let's say that I think the biggest thing, again, I have my own biases. It's like, yeah, the working class, because that's what I'm from. And then when I found that young man, Leslie Simmons, Leslie Elliot Simmons, he was a Mayflower. I always, I always joke about the Mayflower people because, you know, being a, a recent immigrant family, we're not the Mayflower people. And that was driven home to me in, in grade school when I was told I didn't have a history. Leslie was of the Mayflower people, and he was, he was wealthy or than a lot of the people who were at Western Electric. He was a photographer though for the company. And he went on board the Eastland to do the photography, not because he was really part of the picnic. Leslie was killed too.
Natalie
So it opened, it, it dealt with my own bias, because regardless, we wanna, we can't put our judgments to one side entirely. But the biggest thing is to be aware of them. And it's like uhoh. Gotcha. You know, it's one of those kinds of things where you're wrong and it's actually wonderful to be proven wrong. It's wonderful to have those biases broken open because that is the only way life can come through. Only way that, and, and lives are, these lives are complicated. They're contradictory, they're all different. And I'm just doing, finishing up week three of a series on the Lutheran communities in Chicago who were affected by the Eastland disasters. Because I said, we Lutheran people, I have a Lutheran background on my mom's side, we're not exactly grand standers. It's like, well, you know, that's okay. Somebody else can take that. You know, it's okay.
Natalie
Put the best construction on everything. So it's like, wait a minute, these people need to be brought up. But within the Lutheran communities in Chicago, you have the German, the Swedish, the Norwegian, the Danish, the Finnish, the Slovak. You have all kinds of flavors of this. And they have different focuses on how they, their faith communities function, how their records are kept. And again, we have to deal with the fact that they don't all align and march in order the way you think they should. They're all each, each congregation, each church is different, each synagogue is different. And so we have to be able to deal with all this contradiction in our heads and deal with the fact that in order to give life to something, life is unpredictable and people are unpredictable and they never behave in the way you think that they should. You know, that kind of thing. Yeah,
Pat
Yeah. Well, it makes me wonder, what does this newspaper window into the past teach us about the importance of recording and remembering our current events?
Natalie
Well, the one thing that I'm really grateful for in all these newspapers and the different documentation I'm finding is how fragile it all is. And were it not for things, it's not just newspapers. I want, I want to say too, shout out to the Western Electric Company news that also had a lot of stories. And I found that on Google Books, again, free and shout out to those people who, who have been able to keep entities like find a grave and the little stories for each person there, even if it's died on the Eastland. And even if they have no other information about them, but they have died on the Eastland, so they honor the people. But history's really fragile. And unless the conference I was just at Roots Tech, one of my genealogy teachers was there and she was commending a woman who had taken out this obscure, I don't know what, what the ancestry was, something very obscure.
Natalie
And she said, thank you for doing that. You're now the spokesperson for it. And the woman was like, whoa. But I feel like I don't wanna be a spokesperson for it, but until somebody better comes along, I'm gonna do this. Okay, that's how I feel about it. And there is a feeling of complete gratitude. I'm honored to be able to do, do whatever I can do. I am particularly blessed by the people that have come forward who have helped me with a lot of this stuff and have filled in the blanks for me. And by my listeners, I'm shocked actually that my highest number of listeners are from Finland. I don't know why. I know it's like, uh, I have to try to figure out what's happened with the Finnish community so far. I haven't found too many of them in Chicago, but go fins, that's great.
Natalie
And the other thing too is it's just a feeling of if you don't do it, it, it could disappear. And I have to commend, you know, the Eastland Disaster Historical Society, they've done their part of keeping it going. The Newberry has, has definitely taken over a lot of the artifacts. And that is a reputable, wonderful place. They're doing stuff. The Chicago History Museum, my friends at the Chicago Public Library, 'cause I bother them all the time. And the folks at the University of Illinois, Champagne, Champagne Urbana, I always forget that, forgive me which order. But there are all these folks that really care. And really, to me, if I find a good librarian, I'm there. A good historian, I'm there. Those people are awesome.
Pat
You know, you've often said, quote, we are future ancestors. What does this mean for people who want to do family histories? Like how do they start? Where do you begin?
Natalie
Hmm. Well, as I've often said too, in a more, a different way, we're future dead people. So it's how do you want to be remembered? And if you wanna begin with your own story, that's a good place. I think it depends on how you work and how you work. Well, you have to know yourself. And, and how I've done a lot of things is I've taken different classes from different people that are wonderful. I have to say genealogists. And people who teach genealogy stuff are the most generous, knowledgeable, kind people. The biggest thing I learned from all of them, whether it's Lisa Louise Cooke or Sonny Morton or Lisa Alzo or, or Blaine Bettinger, they treat your family like it's their own. And I try to reciprocate when somebody gives me a genealogy problem, which is how I've handled this Eastland story. It's like I take the genealogies of people.
Natalie
I know how to find records. I'm, I'm an Oslo, Norway now looking for stuff. It's just like, I know how to construct a family tree and I know it's going to be painful and very difficult and hard, but I know how to do this thanks to them. And I treat them like I treat my own family. So I think once you get those habits in place and learn how to do the research, then it's much easier if you're going to do a family history. But is it daunting? Is it difficult? It really is. And I'd say be patient with yourself and decide. And your purpose will become revealed, I think, as you work on it. Because sometimes I just, it's like, oh, this is fun, but it's hard work. And having to go back. I'll tell you, I didn't know about source citations when I first started doing this.
Natalie
And that means you document, where did you get this from? And now when I look back at my early stuff, I thought, oh, how, where did that come from? So, the likelihood of errors is pretty high sometimes, so you have to go back and fix stuff. It is a huge commitment to do it. I don't wanna say do it right, because we're all, like I said, one document away from being, having the house of cards go. But I would say it's, it's daunting. It's difficult. I take breaks from it every so often when I'm getting a little too close as, as Hank Jones would say, too close to the butterfly net because it's like, well gotta get away. I think it's, it's really necessary to find out what your style is. I am what they call a discovery writer. I don't work from outlines, I just jump in to like a newspaper.
Natalie
What's here? Okay, I'll look up Eastland disaster. Oh there's a name, who's that? And then I just kind of go into rabbit holes. Um, people sometimes derive people from spending too much time in the rabbit holes, as they call it, of genealogy. I live there and I found out so much stuff. I love researching. I learned how to do research and I'm always learning how to do better research. But I love, and I love ancient languages. I love times that are not the one that I live in. And I love being able to put myself into the place of those people because those people gave birth to all of us. And whether it's through biology or just through the history that they've created, whether it's Minneapolis, St. Paul, where we are here, who were those people that came before us and Chicago and Cleveland and Detroit and all these places. So it's like, it's just figuring out what your style is, how you wanna do it, and what is your goal. Well,
Pat
As we get near the end of our conversation, I wanna ask you why must we remember those who have passed?
Natalie
I need to think about that for a second. Because they've made us who we are. And as you look at something like the Eastland disaster, Lord, what they went through and they didn't have the support that we have, we think sometimes it's hard now it was hard then. And it's important to remember that they got through some stuff. They didn't smile their way through. They didn't necessarily come out the way we hoped, but still
...there was something in them that just said, I came here for a better life and I'm going to try to figure out what that looks like. And then they passed the torch. Some of them did not have a good life after their person or her sons were killed on the Eastland. Some of them just fell apart. And that was it. Even from that, grow compassion inside yourself to understand your past.
Natalie
So, it's kind of, it's like self-acceptance. But it's also, as I've been trying to do, build the world around the Eastland disaster, it's not just my family that was affected all these people. So it pulls you out of, you have to kind of go deep and hyper-focus on yourself and you have to pull out and just say, this did not happen in a vacuum. How did that ship get out there to begin with? And why were these people not, you know, cared for in a way that I would like them to be cared for? And what can we learn from these events? I can't say. So it doesn't happen again. It's always happening again. There's always an Eastland, several happening all the time, but maybe we can build some speed bumps to slow down some of these pointless, and this was a pointless tragedy. That ship should have never been allowed to go anywhere other than to the scrap heap. 'cause it was already a problem. What can we learn? And I would say it strengthens...my own resolve to keep talking, to keep honoring these people because we are, whether it's 911, whether it's Eastland Disaster, if you experienced that- somehow we're united with those souls... I think, I can't prove it. But that's how I look at them. They're my family too.
Pat
Yeah, I came across a quote last night and my reading that I think really encapsulates our discussion quote, but “History is never far behind us. It's the familiar ghost we trail in our wake.” And that's from the author Olivia Hawker.
Pat
Well Natalie, thank you for joining us today. It's always nice to have you back on FTC and, uh, good
Natalie
To be here. Thank you.
Pat
You just gave us so much to think about. Hey Natalie, before we go, will you tell us where can folks find your book and, uh, tell us about your website?
Natalie
Sure. My website is www.flowerintheriver.com, that's blended together.. I'm all over the socials, meaning Facebook, LinkedIn, what's Twitter now X, Instagram, all that. And please subscribe because I put out a newsletter once a week and ask me any questions you like. And my podcast is also called Flower in the River Podcast to make it easy. And that's available on all the podcasting networks. But by all means reach out and, um, I would love to hear from people to hear how their family history is going. And I hope they have fun climbing their family tree
Pat
Okay, so folks, I will put these links into the show notes so that you can, uh, find flower in the river. So thank you, Natalie. Bye
Natalie
Bye.
Pat
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