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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 kicking her away, and the two other strangers whose hands pulled her to safety. Her friends never made it off the ship. That contrast — a precise memory set against an incomprehensible toll — reframes the Eastland Disaster that claimed more than 800 lives.

From there, we widen the lens. Anna’s account intersects with the larger story: ballast decisions, the court ruling that declared the Eastland “seaworthy,” and the ship’s second life as a Navy training vessel on the Great Lakes before being scrapped after World War II. 

Then the trail moves into the realm of records. Through baptismal entries, census pages, and obituary lines, we confirm that she was born Alma Augusta Johanna Meinert to Prussian immigrants, married a Grimmer, raised a daughter, and later settled in Baton Rouge. Her obituary makes no mention of the disaster — a reminder of how easily family memory can disconnect from the events that shaped it.

And this entire journey is only possible because of the Eastland Memorial Society, whose meticulous early work created a template for how history should be preserved: clearly, respectfully, and without turning real lives into marketing material. Though the organization is gone, its archived website on the Wayback Machine continues to guide research like this — proof that good historical work keeps paying forward.

That’s the lesson in Anna’s story: when we connect photographs, survivor interviews, and genealogy, we return people to history and history to families.

Take a moment to get to know Anna Meinert Grimmer. She’s been waiting a long time.

Resources:

Fitzpatrick, Thomas. “Horror of Eastland Haunts Memory of Survivor.” Chicago Tribune, July 11, 1965.

Lane, Russell. “812 Died Half Century Ago: Suddenly the Boat Lurched.” Jacksonville Courier (Jacksonville, Illinois), July 23, 1965.

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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 stories and volunteer research — resurfaced in later retellings without the names of the people who first contributed them.

In other words, the attribution was MIA.

And I’ll share how the record can be rebuilt using clear sources, solid attribution, and a commitment to course-correction whenever new evidence turns up — those moments where the archive gently reminds you, “There’s more to the story.”

The guideposts are stubbornly simple:

• Cite your sources
• Credit those who did the work
• Welcome contradiction.
• Keep the file open for new research — even if it means letting go of a cherished assumption (or two!).

In this episode, I spotlight the Eastland Memorial Society — the under-credited early web project that built timelines, tracked permissions, preserved photographs, saved media coverage, and offered essential context back when the internet was barely out of diapers. Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, those pages now act as a genuine research Rosetta Stone.

Resources:

• The Eastland Disaster (1999). Documentary featuring members of the Eastland Memorial Society and historian George Hilton. Digitized by the Internet Archive.
• Eastland Memorial Society, “News,” archived Oct. 20, 2000, via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
• Hilton, George Woodman. Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.

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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 confusion to seconds, and worked under fire in wooden barracks —yet they weren’t officially recognized as veterans until 1977 thanks to President Jimmy Carter. Along the way, we read from the 1920 Green Book magazine feature that captured the role’s grit and grace: 

• a chief operator swept away in a New Mexico flood after clearing her crew, 
• a Chicago operator who kept cool as glass rained down after a bombing, and 
• Texas teams who reported to flooded exchanges in bathing suits because the calls couldn’t wait.

We also talk ethics and craft: The operator who ran the Peace Conference switchboard and never “listened in,” is a reminder that power over the line demands restraint. Inside smaller exchanges, chiefs balanced training, staffing, reports, and the daily diplomacy of customer tempers. And we honor one whose skill modernized boards during the 1893 World’s Fair and whose name graced a rest home for operators.

This is a story about communication as a social contract. Before automation, the network had a heartbeat, and it belonged to women who treated urgency with poise and turned chaos into connection. If the history of technology often centers machines, these voices remind us that trust is the first infrastructure.

Resources:

• The Green Book Magazine (Nov. 1920)
• Smithsonian audio: Telephone Operators
• A Switchboard Operator and a Nurse Walk Into a Shipwreck

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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, provenance, and trust across the fragile web.

What began as a family story became a case study in restoring authorship and digital integrity.

We walk through the dynamic immigrant life of Cicero, the morning the Eastland rolled into the Chicago River, and the sibling who arrived just as the ship capsized.

Alongside those details, we share how we traced the original 1999 article, found the author’s later blog posts, and mapped the path of unattributed copies that flattened key context.

If you love genealogy, public history, or deep research, this episode offers a practical toolkit:

•Time-stamped archiving with the Wayback Machine and Archive.Today

•Side-by-side document comparison

•A clear-eyed approach to AI that favors verification over automation

We close by restoring the story—and the storyteller’s name—to its rightful place.

Recognizing the author isn’t optional—it’s about respecting ownership, upholding ethics, and protecting the record for those who follow.

Resources:

• Family History by Colleen (Colleen Ringel's blog)
• Chronicle Makers (Denyse Allen) 
• Genealogy Gems (Lisa Louise Cooke)
• The Familly History AI Show (Make Thompson & Steve Little) 
• Archive.today
• Internet Archive Wayback Machine
• View Gabriella Schlentz’s FamilySearch profile here.

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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 street scenes, and why visual design can make genealogy, urban history, and public memory feel immediate. Ryan walks us through the choices that keep the experience human: desktop-first for big images, intuitive hover interactions for quick context, and a workflow that mixes Affinity apps, Image Map Pro, and a lean site builder. The result invites you to zoom into specifics—storefront signage, transit lines, architectural facades—and to link names, neighborhoods, and events with evidence you can study.

Attribution and ethics are a throughline. As images drift across social media without credits, Ryan anchors each photo to institutions like the Newberry Library, Library of Congress, and Chicago Public Library, restoring provenance so researchers and curious minds can find companion materials and verify dates. 

We also explore the thrill of discovery—hidden collections, estate finds, and the Vivian Maier story—and why independent creators are vital to preserving local history. Chicago’s layered neighborhoods become a living syllabus, and help historical events, connecting historical events like the Eastland Disaster to the streets, jobs, and homes that shaped real lives.

If you enjoy Chicago history, genealogy, cartography, or simply great design that makes knowledge accessible, you’ll love this one. Explore Ryan’s work at VagabondStudiosDesign.com and ChicagoHistoryMap.org (links below). 

Resources:

🧭 Ryan Wilson's site: Vagabond Studios

🗺️ Dive into Ryan Wilson's Chicago History Map Project

🖼️ Vivian Maier Photography Archive

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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 the first online lists. We also explain why numbers in mass tragedies should stay open to revision, not carved in stone.

Then we bring three family voices back into the light:

• Ole Nicholas Jensen, rescuer and survivor.
• Mary Vrba Lippert, whose resilience carried her from a Wisconsin farm to Western Electric.
• Frieda Emma Amelia Till, saved at 17 and determined to build a full life after that harrowing experience.

Their stories—once carefully attributed online—eventually lost their bylines or  disappeared from view.  We talk about how that happens, how to restore them, and why proper citations and links aren’t pedantry—they’re respect.

This is a story about historiography, ethics, and repair: using the Internet Archive, public history standards, and persistence to restore authorship, correct omissions, and make the record more trustworthy for descendants, educators, and curious listeners.

If you love genealogy, history, or digital preservation, you’ll find both practical guidance and renewed purpose—along with a cautionary tale.

Resources:

• Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Archived version of “Biographies” page, Eastland Memorial Society website. Captured October 9, 2015.
• Elizabeth Shown Mills, “QuickLesson 15: Plagiarism—Five ‘Copywrongs’ of Historical Writing,” Evidence Explained, n.d., accessed October 15, 2025

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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 and streetcars.

From that riverbank, the story widens. Griggs grew into a tireless radio actor—over 5,000 shows—and the calm, persuasive voice of Roger Elliot on House of Mystery. Under trailblazing producer Olga Druce, the program won praise for blending suspense with science, helping kids face fear with clear thinking rather than superstition. That mission resonates with the Eastland’s hard lessons: design matters, ballast and beam matter, and ignoring repeated warnings carries a human cost. We walk through the ship’s troubled history, the investigations that followed, and the strange afterlife of the Eastland as USS Wilmette, a training vessel that sailed safely for years once stripped and balanced.

Along the way, we reclaim Griggs not only as a witness and performer, but as a quiet guardian of culture. He assembled one of the largest private film collections in the country, later forming the foundation of Yale’s Film Studies Center. Memory survives because people choose to keep it: through writing, radio, archives, and stories we pass on. Join us as we connect a six-minute catastrophe to a lifetime of teaching courage, reason, and care in storytelling.

Resources

• John Griggs, “Excursion to Death,” American Heritage 16, no. 2 (February 1965).
• “Olga Druce,” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
• From Eastland Witness to Radio Legend: John Griggs’ Journey (Flower in the River Podcast)

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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 can rescue memory from the margins.

I share the early frustration of facing Hilton’s dense footnotes while craving a human arc, and how another Eastland researcher’s long-lost web essays built a bridge into the story.

Along the way, we unpack Hilton’s core thesis: how post-Titanic safety regulations, lifeboat mandates, and a top-heavy design converged with ballast flaws to create catastrophic instability. We revisit the numbers debate — death certificates, Coast Guard counts, Tribune tallies — and highlight the rare intellectual humility Hilton showed by documenting uncertainty rather than forcing false precision. It’s a masterclass in research methods, regulatory history, and ethical remembrance.

We also sketch Hilton’s life: Chicago-born, Dartmouth- and University of Chicago-trained, UCLA professor, prolific author on railroads, cable cars, and night boats. Hilton literally went the extra mile, visiting the graves of Eastland victims to verify names and pay respect. He never tried to control the narrative, but instead invited others to complete the record and join the research.

That spirit propels our push to make his work more accessible through digital and audio editions — because discoverability is the lifeline of public history and genealogy.

Resources:

• The Eastland Disaster. Documentary. Southport Video Productions, 1999. Accessed via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Featuring George Hilton.
• George W. Hilton. Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic. Stanford University Press, April 1995

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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 was able to restore a missing piece of the Eastland story.

This episode is also a tribute to George Hilton, whose Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic remains the cornerstone of Eastland research. His scholarship was unmatched, and like all historians (and genealogists), he knew the work was not complete and invited future scholars to review, correct, and expand on it. By leaving the door open for discoveries like this one, Hilton reminded us that history is never finished — it is a shared effort across generations.

Resources:

• 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, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. Records preserved in the National Archives Catalog.
• George Woodman Hilton, Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), Internet Archive
• Eastland Disaster Victims: A Virtual Cemetery. Find a Grave.

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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 involved,” Rickover later wrote, “some people will stop at nothing to get it.”

This discovery emerged from a 1979 newspaper article—one of many overlooked historical threads I’ve been pulling while researching the human stories behind the Eastland Disaster. The revelation pairs perfectly with another significant find—court documents from the National Archives containing detailed personal injury claims filed by survivors against the steamship company.

These legal records give voice to survivors whose experiences have remained buried for over a century. Frank Brady described being “violently thrown” into the Chicago River, leaving his “nervous system greatly injured, shocked and shattered.” Harold Durkee detailed broken ankle bones and lost wages totaling what would be thousands in today’s dollars. Mrs. Abby Wiley recounted being trapped in the water, suffering injuries that prevented her from working while medical bills mounted.

These documents are invaluable primary sources—actual testimony rather than newspaper accounts or later retellings. They reveal not just the physical and emotional trauma of survivors, but the financial devastation many faced. A $10,000 claim in 1915 represents roughly $320,000 today, showing the magnitude of what these working-class families lost.

These stories were never truly hidden—they’ve been waiting here all along. Join me as we uncover the forgotten voices of the Eastland Disaster, stories that have lingered in plain sight, just waiting to be seen and heard.

Resources:

• Hyman G. Rickover, “Eastland Disaster,” Union Leader (Manchester, NH), May 28, 1979.
• National Archives and Records Administration. (n.d.). Folder 14: Claims and libels (Record Group 21, Records of District Courts of the United States, Law Case Files, In the matter of the petition of St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company, owner of the Steamer Eastland, for limitation of liability) [Court records]. National Archives Catalog. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/485300049?objectPage=83

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