Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Send us Fan Mail We journey deeper into "Catastrophe on the Chicago River," a century-old chronicle of the Eastland Disaster as seen through the eyes of Chicago's Czech community. Josef Mach Sr. crafts a living, breathing account of the capsized excursion ship, trading headlines and statistics for the intimate details of lives upended. This narrative names names, lists addresses and...

Send us Fan Mail When Research Starts Talking Back What happens when your research doesn’t just sit there quietly… but starts nudging you, whispering, insisting you dig deeper? In this episode, I try something a little different. After sharing my 2025 retrospective, The Search Goes On — Coincidence. Clarity. Resolve. , I handed that episode to Google’s NotebookLM —an AI tool many genealogists are...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 a...

Send us Fan Mail 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 m...

Send us Fan Mail 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 is...

Send us Fan Mail A forgotten headline. A crowded dock. A father who turns back to a capsized  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 arch...

Send us Fan Mail 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 resear...

Send us Fan Mail 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: w...

Send us Fan Mail Tracing the Eastland story back to the people who first preserved it online. 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 storie...

Send us Fan Mail 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 Femal...

Send us Fan Mail 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 attribut...

Send us Fan Mail 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....

Send us Fan Mail 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 Hil...

Send us Fan Mail 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 pa...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 unde...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 th...

Send us Fan Mail 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 Eastl...

Send us Fan Mail One shout could have saved lives. On the morning of the Eastland Disaster, a lone street peddler saw the danger before anyone else. His warning was met with laughter and scorn, and while his experience was recounted in the papers, it was under the wrong name. In this episode, we return to Dwight Boyer’s True Tales of the Great Lakes and follow one story back in time—stepping onto...

Send us Fan Mail In this week’s episode, I continue reading from "Who Speaks for the Little Feller?"—Dwight Boyer’s unforgettable chapter in "True Tales of the Great Lakes" (1971), one of the earliest and most detailed accounts of the Eastland disaster. A meticulous maritime journalist, Boyer combined accuracy with deep empathy, giving voice to the people whose lives were forev...

Send us Fan Mail What We’re Covering: Maritime journalist Dwight Boyer (1912–1977) published a detailed Eastland Disaster account in 1971—more than two decades before most major works on the subject His chapter in True Tales of the Great Lakes draws from courtroom records, witness interviews, and primary source material Although George Hilton cited Boyer in Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic , Boyer&...