Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Natalie Zett
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"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. 

  1. 6d ago

    Blowtorches, Beer & Forgotten Headlines: Eastland Confidential

    Send us Fan Mail Content note: This episode includes discussion of alcoholism, mental health difficulties, psychiatric hospitalization, and family bereavement. In September 1933, Chicago was celebrating its Century of Progress World's Fair. The country was also moving toward the repeal of Prohibition, bringing an end to a controversial chapter in American history. The city was looking toward the future, but at the Congress Hotel, another gathering was looking back. The 34th Annual Convention of the International Acetylene Association honored three men for something extraordinary they had done eighteen years earlier. Their names were John Siwek, George Goffman, and James Zimmerman. They were blowtorch welders who helped rescue passengers when the Eastland capsized in the Chicago River on July 24, 1915. An Associated Press article about the ceremony appeared in newspapers across the country. Yet today, the biographies for these men and their fellow rescuers are largely absent from modern accounts of the Eastland disaster. How does that happen? That question sends us back into the newspaper archives, where an investigation into overlooked rescuers leads to another discovery: a discrepancy involving a historical photograph, a published identification, and the importance of tracing information back to its original source. Then we turn to John Siwek, who was only eighteen when he helped save lives aboard the overturned Eastland. His story takes us well beyond the events of July 1915 and the honors he received in 1933. Behind the headlines was a man whose later years included profound family losses and personal struggles. His biography is complicated, sometimes heartbreaking, and far more revealing than the brief references to his heroism suggest. This episode explores what happens when we look beyond the familiar accounts of a historical tragedy and begin reconstructing the lives of the people who were there. Because surviving a disaster—or helping others survive one—doesn't mean the rest of life will be easy.  Historical Newspaper Sources Muskogee Daily Phoenix and Times-Democrat, September 27, 1933, p. 2.The Daily Illini, June 4, 1931, p. 1.Chicago Tribune, June 9, 1931, p. 19.Book website: https://www.flowerintheriver.com/Substack: https://nataliezett.substack.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-z-87092b15/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zettnatalie/YouTube: Flower in the River - A Family Tale Finally Told - YouTubeMedium: Natalie Zett – MediumThe opening/closing song is Twilight by 8opusOther music. Artlist

    Blowtorches, Beer & Forgotten Headlines: Eastland Confidential

  2. Oct 21

    The Daughters of La Grange: An Eastland Family History

    Send us Fan Mail One saved obituary turned into a full investigation and it changed how I think about the Eastland disaster. I’m taking you to LaGrange, Illinois, where a 1929 newspaper notice for Helen Siep Hengels  includes the line that stops you cold: her daughter Barbara drowned when the Eastland capsized in the Chicago River. That single record doesn’t just document a death, it opens a door into a whole web of family, faith, work, and the long tail of grief. From there, I zoom out to the local history that makes this story possible: how LaGrange grew through railroads, suburbanization, and Chicago’s changing geography after the Great Chicago Fire. Then I bring it back to the working lives behind the tragedy, using a 1913 Western Electric News piece that treats transportation as a lifeline for employees commuting to the Hawthorne Works. Those transit routes explain why families living outside Chicago still show up in Eastland records. The deepest reveal comes through church burial registers and careful genealogy work. St. Francis Xavier Church points to multiple Eastland victims, including Barbara and her 16 year old cousin Helena Siep, and the research forces us to deal with spelling variations that can erase immigrant families from online databases. Finally, Western Electric’s own lists confirm why they were on the Eastland, and I share what the records say about what happened to the parents afterward and how the consequences of such losses can reach across generations. Please subscribe or follow, share the episode with someone who enjoys Chicago history and family history research, and leave a review so more listeners can find Flower In The River. Resources: Helen Marie (Siep) Hengels obituary, La Grange News, 11 April 1929; “La Grange, Brown, Illinois, United States records,” images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QHV-B35R-T8BF?view=fullText : 6 August 2026), image 140 of 753; Daughters of the American Revolution (Illinois), Image Group Number 008959848.“Alma, Wo Wohnst Du? Being a Few Hints on Where to Live Around Hawthorne,” Western Electric News, June 1913, 6; digitized by Google Books, from the University of Minnesota collection.“Barbara E. Hengels” and “Helena E. Siep,” employee death listings, Western Electric News, August 1915, 10, 13; digitized by Google Books.Book website: https://www.flowerintheriver.com/Substack: https://nataliezett.substack.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-z-87092b15/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zettnatalie/YouTube: Flower in the River - A Family Tale Finally Told - YouTubeMedium: Natalie Zett – MediumThe opening/closing song is Twilight by 8opusOther music. Artlist

    The Daughters of La Grange: An Eastland Family History

  3. Oct 14

    Ludington's Eastland Connection: A Sailor, an Engineer, and a Professor

    Send us Fan Mail What connects a Great Lakes sailor, a ship's engineer, and a mathematics professor to the 1915 Eastland disaster? The answer begins in Ludington, Michigan, with a remarkable letter to the editor published 82 years after the tragedy. In July 1997, retired sailor and maritime historian Raymond Short wrote to the Ludington Daily News, naming several people whose lives intersected with the Eastland disaster. That letter opened the door to stories rarely told in modern accounts of the tragedy. Meet Jewell Schubert, whose parents survived the capsizing while her mother was seven months pregnant. Jewell would go on to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1946. Follow the life of Joseph Laycock, a fireman on duty aboard the Eastland when it capsized. Neither Joseph nor Jewell and her parents appear in modern retellings of the disaster. And discover Fred G. Snow, the Eastland's second assistant engineer, whose testimony before the coroner's jury raises troubling questions about what happened aboard the ship that morning. But that testimony tells us only part of his story. It's his obituary, published fourteen years later, that gives us a much fuller picture of Fred Snow—the man behind the testimony. But the story doesn't end there. Who was Raymond Short, the man who preserved these connections? A working Great Lakes sailor, World War II Merchant Marine veteran, and maritime historian, Ray spent a lifetime learning about ships and the people who sailed them. His 1997 letter left a trail of names and information that could still be followed decades later. This episode also explores what happens when complicated historical events are reduced to simplified narratives, leaving people, records, and unanswered questions behind. And there's a brief follow-up on AI-altered historical photographs and the much older problem of missing source citations and provenance. From Chicago's riverfront to the shores of Lake Michigan, this week's Flower in the River follows the records, restores overlooked connections, and introduces us to people whose lives extended far beyond July 24, 1915. Because none of us exists as just a name on a list. Resources: Raymond E. Short, “Today Is Anniversary of Eastland Capsizing,” Ludington Daily News (Ludington, Michigan), July 24, 1997, “Readers’ Forum,” Google Books. University of Illinois, University of Illinois Internal Budget for 1961–62 (1961), 823 (listing Jewell Schubert as Assistant Professor of Mathematics)Rob Alway, “Ludington Man Survived Worst Great Lakes Maritime Disaster, on the SS Eastland,” Mason County Press, January 9, 2026.Patty LaNoue Stearns, “The Gales of November: Great Lakes Ferryman’s Respect for the Water Is Strongest This Time of Year,” Detroit Free Press, November 9, 1997, Section E, p. 1E, “Sunday Voices,” interview with Raymond Short.George W. Hilton, Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995)Maureen Taylor, “AI-Altered Family Photos: The Growing Threat to Genealogy and Historical Accuracy,” The Photo Detective, episode 269, October 9, 2026, podcast audio.Book website: https://www.flowerintheriver.com/Substack: https://nataliezett.substack.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-z-87092b15/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zettnatalie/YouTube: Flower in the River - A Family Tale Finally Told - YouTubeMedium: Natalie Zett – MediumThe opening/closing song is Twilight by 8opusOther music. Artlist

    Ludington's Eastland Connection: A Sailor, an Engineer, and a Professor

  4. Oct 7

    A Flower for the Little Feller: Anastasia's Goodbye

    Send us Fan Mail 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. Resources: Waukegan Daily Sun, July 31, 1915, p. 1Illinois Digital ArchivesBook website: https://www.flowerintheriver.com/Substack: https://nataliezett.substack.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-z-87092b15/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zettnatalie/YouTube: Flower in the River - A Family Tale Finally Told - YouTubeMedium: Natalie Zett – MediumThe opening/closing song is Twilight by 8opusOther music. Artlist

    A Flower for the Little Feller: Anastasia's Goodbye

  5. Oct 1

    Saloons, Scandals, and Survival: The Biehl Family and the Eastland

    Send us Fan Mail This week, we’re heading back to Waukegan, Illinois, where the newspapers once again lead us into a much bigger Eastland story than expected. At the center is Frederick Biehl, a 26-year-old former Waukegan resident who died in the disaster. But as I began reconstructing his family, the story quickly expanded into a complicated network of relatives, survivors, conflicting newspaper accounts, and identities that needed a closer look. And then there is Frederick’s mother, Annie Biehl. Years before the Eastland disaster, Annie operated a saloon on South Genesee Street in Waukegan and repeatedly came into conflict with city authorities. The surviving coverage is dramatic and sometimes sensational—but the records leave plenty of unanswered questions. We’ll also look at what happens when repetition begins to replace research in Eastland history—and why the Genealogical Proof Standard requires “complete and accurate citations” as Element Two. Those citations are not a formality. They are a safeguard: without them, history can be separated from its evidence, repeated claims can harden into “fact,” and the people themselves can disappear behind a marketable narrative. But at the heart of this episode is Annie: a complicated woman whose home became a gathering place not only for her own family, but for two young men from other families as well. And Waukegan still has more stories to tell. Resources: Buried by Omission: The Eastland Victim Who Disappeared (PROMO Video)Waukegan Daily Sun (Waukegan, Illinois), July 26, 1915, pp. 1, 4–5, 8.Waukegan Daily Sun (Waukegan, Illinois), July 28, 1915Book website: https://www.flowerintheriver.com/Substack: https://nataliezett.substack.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-z-87092b15/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zettnatalie/YouTube: Flower in the River - A Family Tale Finally Told - YouTubeMedium: Natalie Zett – MediumThe opening/closing song is Twilight by 8opusOther music. Artlist

    Saloons, Scandals, and Survival: The Biehl Family and the Eastland

  6. Sep 24

    Waukegan’s Happiest Man, a Telegram & Family Ties Across Time

    Send us Fan Mail What happens when the newspaper survives, but the stories inside it need reassembling? Stay with me on this one.  Amid the Eastland disaster coverage, a Waukegan newspaper suddenly drops one survivor tale and shifts focus to a different story. Over a century later, that fractured page becomes a clue. By following the newspaper trail and family relationships, we can separate the stories and piece together what the surviving evidence reveals. One story is about Frank Kubik of Waukegan, IL. After the Eastland capsized, he searched the newspapers and found his sister Emma's name among the missing. But Emma’s story was far from over. Then a telegram arrived, carrying the joyful news that Emma was alive—and with it, another extraordinary tale of survival. John Behounek, who was married to Frank's sister, Rose, spent nearly twenty harrowing minutes in the Chicago River, fighting to keep himself and his wife, Rose, afloat amid panic, exhaustion, swirling debris, and the peril of a drowning person’s desperate grip. Their story lingered in the newspapers, but like so many Eastland tales, it stayed trapped in 1915, never carried forward to new generations. All the people in this story survived the Eastland disaster only to die relatively young in the years that followed. Did their ordeal in the polluted Chicago River contribute to their later health struggles? What could we discover by tracing their long-term health? What patterns might surface if we followed these lives after the disaster? And what insights were lost when that research faded? And finally, we return to the heart of why stories hold such power. Family stories can give us resilience, identity, and a connection to something larger than ourselves. They can stay with us, shape us, and sometimes surface again years later in ways we never expected. And every now and then, a story that isn’t ours can do the same thing—like a forty-something-year-old episode of a TV show that stayed with me long before I understood why. Resources: Waukegan Daily Sun (Waukegan, Illinois), July 26, 1915, pp. 1, 4–5, 8.Extra! Extra! The Eastland Stories Marooned in 1915. PROMO “The Way We Were.” Family Ties. Season 6, episode 9. Written by Gary David Goldberg. Directed by Will Mackenzie. NBC, November 8, 1987.Find a Grave, database and images, memorial 161800205, “Emma Kubik Piatek (1897–1917),” citing Bohemian National Cemetery, Chicago, Cook County, Illinois; https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/161800205/emma-piatek : accessed 24 September 2026.Book website: https://www.flowerintheriver.com/Substack: https://nataliezett.substack.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-z-87092b15/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zettnatalie/YouTube: Flower in the River - A Family Tale Finally Told - YouTubeMedium: Natalie Zett – MediumThe opening/closing song is Twilight by 8opusOther music. Artlist

    Waukegan’s Happiest Man, a Telegram & Family Ties Across Time

  7. Sep 17

    Extra! Extra! The Eastland Stories Marooned in 1915

    Send us Fan Mail This week, I explored the July 26, 1915 edition of the Waukegan Daily Sun, a newspaper packed with Eastland stories that have sat there for more than a century. As is often the case, the people in those articles are mostly absent from today’s Eastland history accounts. Then, one story turned into a newspaper version of Where’s Waldo? (Where’s Wally?), its trail veering off into the lives of a completely different family. Next, we slip behind the curtain of a 1915 newsroom. Reporters dash to the Chicago River, jotting frantic notes, searching for telephones, and dictating stories as the Eastland disaster unravels in real time. Meanwhile, back at the office, editors, linotype operators, stereotypers, pressmen, and a bustling crew must somehow transform all that turmoil into a finished newspaper. A special mention goes to the linotype machine, which was part typewriter, part vending machine, and part backhoe. It was one of the inventions that changed publishing. Given the speed and pressure these newspaper workers faced during the Eastland Disaster, it’s amazing how much they got right. It also helps explain how things sometimes went spectacularly sideways. This brings us to Harry John Tiemann and Alice Lucille Garland Tiemann, two Eastland survivors whose story bursts with drama before splintering apart. Alice faints as the ship overturns, a stranger pulls her through the water, Harry fights to reach her, and then the article abruptly veers into another person’s story. So, I picked up the thread, following it through their marriage records, census rolls, Western Electric files, a 1948 death notice, and even Alice’s later adventures on the community theater stage. Their story, like many others, had been sitting in that newspaper since 1915. This week, we invite you to meet them. Resources: Waukegan Daily Sun (Waukegan, Illinois), July 26, 1915, pp. 1, 4–5, 8.The WGN: A Handbook of Newspaper Administration, Editorial, Advertising, Production, Circulation, Minutiae. Chicago: Chicago Tribune Company, 1922.Book website: https://www.flowerintheriver.com/Substack: https://nataliezett.substack.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-z-87092b15/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zettnatalie/YouTube: Flower in the River - A Family Tale Finally Told - YouTubeMedium: Natalie Zett – MediumThe opening/closing song is Twilight by 8opusOther music. Artlist

    Extra! Extra! The Eastland Stories Marooned in 1915

  8. Sep 10

    Dorothy Missed the Boat. Fred Broke a Window: Eastland Survival Stories

    Send us Fan Mail Being a few minutes late can change an entire life. Yet being thoroughly documented doesn’t guarantee anyone will keep researching. This week, we follow two strikingly different threads from the 1915 Eastland disaster and examine how unevenly this history has been documented. First, let’s talk about Dorothy Berman. In July 1985, seventy years after the disaster, Dorothy went back to the Chicago River and shared her story with several newspapers. At the time of the disaster, she was a 20-year-old file clerk at Western Electric who planned to board the Eastland for the company picnic but showed up late. Instead, she stood on the riverbank and watched the ship capsize “like a toy,” while people screamed and slid into the water. She survived, but the memories of that day stayed with her for the rest of her life. When Dorothy was almost ninety, she spoke to reporters, and her story appeared in newspaper after newspaper. Still, in modern histories of the Eastland disaster, her name and eyewitness account are missing. Next, we meet Fred Hornburg, his father, and his brothers, all Western Electric employees who survived. Today, they linger as little more than names on a list, while the lives and connections behind those names have gone largely unexplored. Fred told the story of his Eastland survival in a 1951 newspaper article. By then, he was working as a bridge tender, looking directly over the stretch of the Chicago River where the ship capsized. His account takes us back to Fred at fourteen, trapped inside the Eastland as the water rushed in, and follows his remarkable escape. The article also mentions the use of a Pulmotor resuscitation device, giving us another look at how Chicago responded to emergencies and connecting this story to the city’s earlier experience with the Iroquois Theater fire. Dorothy Berman’s eyewitness account was recorded in newspaper after newspaper, then disappeared from modern histories. Fred Hornburg and his family remained, but mostly as names on a page. In this episode, we put the people back behind those names. Resources: “Recalls Eastland Loss from Job Vantage Point.” Chicago Sun-Times, July 25, 1951, p. 49. “Eyewitness Recalls Chicago River Tragedy 70 Years Ago.” Alton Telegraph (Alton, IL), July 29, 1985, p. 3. Book website: https://www.flowerintheriver.com/Substack: https://nataliezett.substack.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-z-87092b15/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zettnatalie/YouTube: Flower in the River - A Family Tale Finally Told - YouTubeMedium: Natalie Zett – MediumThe opening/closing song is Twilight by 8opusOther music. Artlist

    Dorothy Missed the Boat. Fred Broke a Window: Eastland Survival Stories
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About

"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. 

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