Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

The Mayflower People OR The Day I Learned I Had No Family History

• Natalie Zett

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Hello there!

This podcast, or maybe "book-cast," centers around my book, Flower in the River, which opens with the Eastland Disaster of 1915 (in Chicago), where 844 perished.

The book describes how losing a relative during that tragedy affected my family for generations. Although it's historical fiction, it's based on the actual events and the real people who populate my family tree. Sometimes, the truth can be told best via fiction.

The inspiration for the podcast came from the comments and questions I've received since the book was released. 

In this first episode, I will share the wacky journey of how I became a family historian -despite being told by a teacher that since my family didn't arrive on the Mayflower, I had no family history. Yep, you read that right.

Speaker 1:

. Why. Hello again. This is Natalie Zett and welcome to episode one, which I've entitled The Mayflower People or The Day I Learned I had No Family History and how I went on to write a book about my long-buried family history. Anyway, but before we go further, it would help if you knew who I was and what in the heck I'm talking about. If you haven't read my book or if you're not acquainted with the backstory that informs this book, please go to my website. The website is the usual three Ws and the actual name is Flower in the River. Those words are run together, flower in the river do com . While it would be lovely if you bought my book, you don't have to do that, but please take a look at the website to get an idea of what the book is about and what this podcast is about. At a very high level, it's about family history, but specifically, it's about the Eastland disaster of 1915 and how the loss of one family member during that event affected my whole family for generations, even though very few of us even heard of this relative nor had most of us heard of the Eastland disaster. I'm hoping that all of this will inspire you to take action and do something or some more with your own family history, but I've got to open up with this wacky story about how I almost did not become a family, his historian, and I hope it gives you well hope. Listen, if I can do it, you can do it despite any obstacles in your path. Warning, the story you're about to hear makes no sense whatsoever and will even make less sense as I unpack it, but nonetheless, this goofy experience happened and it is part of my life. Let's hop onto the way back machine. It's the mid 1960s and I'm sitting in some elementary school in inner city Cleveland with a lot of other kids who like me would fit in very well as part of the outcasts that populate the fictional Nevermore Academy of Netflix's Wednesday series because we managed to pass a series of standardized tests. The powers that be decided we were smart enough and through us all together in a program that was called in Enrichment Learning, I think it was called, but don't quote me on that one, but by our teacher standards, we were still lacking. We were a bit odd and just maybe more than a bit off, at least according to her, most of us were chill or grandchildren of recent immigrants from Eastern and central Europe and Southern Italy. Most of us that is and other kids were recent immigrants themselves and they had the good fortune of learning English via the sink or swim method by being thrown into a classroom. If they were lucky, one or more of us could translate what the teacher was talking about. A number of my fellow students were black, and I learned later that many of their grandparents and parents came from the south. We were part of the working class, but we didn't know it back then. We just thought we were kids and most of our parents and grandparents worked in various factories or did other blue collar jobs. The lucky families made enough to afford a small bungalow and sometimes even a car. Our futures were decided for us we would grow up and then assume our parents' place in the factories because it was good money and we didn't see ourselves as poor or less than however our teacher begged to differ. I didn't like this teacher and she didn't seem to like any of us either, and she really seemed to have it in for the black kids who were being sent to the principal almost as much as I was. Our crimes were usually talking too much or laughing, but I got into a heap of trouble when I refused to say the pledge of allegiance to the flag. The reason I wasn't being subversive, I was in elementary school and I would not have understood the meaning of the word subversive. I just have this little quirk. I've always wanted to know the reason why someone's asking me to do something, particularly when the something that they're asking me to do seems to make no sense. As long as I understand the reason for the request, it helps me to comply kind of by then, I usually did the opposite of what that teacher told us to do. I guess you could say that I had a problem with authority, but put yourself in the mindset of a first grader or a second grader and being told that you have to talk to a flag. Since the teacher didn't explain why it was important, I didn't think it was a big deal either, so I kind of blew it off, but my parents didn't see it that way. As the children of Eastern European immigrants, my parents had valid concerns, but I didn't understand that back then, but people were still afraid of being accused of being communists, and certain groups like Eastern Europeans were often targeted, so that was the last thing they needed in their lives. They were simply struggling to live and support the family. I remember my mom saying to me, say the pledge, do you want them to put us in jail? It terrified me that I could risk losing my parents over something like that, and so I pledged every morning with my class to the flag of the United States of America, but I couldn't resist a little improvising and added and to the republic where the witches stand even after all these years. I have to wonder what was going on with a teacher who seemed to despise her students. I'm guessing that she too had higher aspirations. Maybe she wanted to teach at one of the exclusive private schools, but for whatever reason didn't make the cut and was stuck with us. Of course, I remember her name, but I'm only going to share a couple letters from her surname. I'm going to call her Mrs. U . That's Eli Edward and a bunch of Ws. Ooh , got it. But Mrs. Oo wasn't done with us yet. Mrs. U had some more tricks up her sleeve and she devised one more assignment that was probably designed to throw more coals of humiliation on our little heads and perhaps put us in our place, certain ones of us more than others. We had to create a family tree and no one knew what that was. Yeah, we knew what a family was and we knew what a tree was, but how were those things supposed to go together? No one knew Mrs. Oo was about to tell us we were to draw a tree and attach labels to it Sounds easy. We would be the first name on the tree and then our parents and our grandparents, et cetera , and we would keep going up the branches until we traced our family back to the Mayflower. You heard that right? The Mayflower, the ship that carried a bunch of pilgrims from the shores of England to the shores of America around 1620 or so. These were the only real Americans, said Mrs. Zoo many, many times. She said, only real Americans can trace their families to the Mayflower. Oh Lord. See what I mean about this story just getting weirder and making no sense. I came home and asked my mom to help me create this family tree, and I told her, oh, by the way, we have to trace our ancestors back to the Mayflower. Well, she looked at me as if I'd begun speaking another language, the Mayflower. She said, we can't. She stumbled around trying to find the words and finally blurted out, we're not Mayflower people. Oh, no, I'm not a real American. You are a real American. She said, you were born here, but your grandparents immigrated over 200 years after the Mayflower. I pressed on, well, don't they have information about these people? Did our other relatives make family trees for them? No. My mother said she was sure there were probably no records for them because they were from Eastern Europe. Those records were destroyed in the war. She said, I'm not sure if this was World War I , world War ii , some other war, the Crusades, I don't know, but it was the way my mother said it. There was nothing to be found, so don't even bother searching. While she didn't say those words exactly, it really doesn't matter because that was the message that I received. This was not her usual way of approaching one of my school assignments. Well, a lot of it probably had to do with quieting me down so I wouldn't get into any more trouble regardless. I was so sad to find out that I had no history, that I couldn't make a family tree that extended beyond my grandparents, and what was worse was having to go back to class and having to tell my nemesis Mrs. Oo , that my family did not write over on the Mayflower, but I told her I was an American because I was born here. Good old Mrs. U had a comeback for everything. In this case, she countered my proclamation by saying, you are an American, but you're not a real American. Well, after the Pledge of Allegiance kerfuffle, my mom was not about to challenge Mrs. U . Well, I managed to pass that grade probably because Mrs. U wanted to get rid of me, but she left her mark on me learning that I had no history because I wasn't A Mayflower person filled me with this sadness that I held onto for a long time. Mrs. Oo couldn't get away with something like that nowadays. Well, at least I hope she couldn't. However, as the years progressed, I found out that Mrs. Oo would appear again and again throughout my life in various incarnations, but I'm happy to report that very few of my teachers after Mrs. Oo were even close to what she was like. In fact, I had some terrific teachers and I credit them with my continual love of learning. I've come to view this story a lot differently than I once did. Mrs. U was a strange sort of gift. It's like a weird gift that you get for Christmas or Hanukkah that really disappoints you and you wish like heck, you could return it, but later on remarkably you find a use for it. So in hindsight, Mrs. U was indeed one of those strange gifts. On the one hand, I will confess that I internalized a lot of the stuff that she said to us kids. On the other hand, at a deeper level, I thought, someday I'm going to prove you wrong, and I don't even know what I meant by that. When Mrs. Oo threw down the gauntlet and I rose to the challenge in my own way, I realized that that's the gift of a situation like this. I didn't let myself ultimately be defined by her dismissiveness, but here comes the kicker and just a little bit of shot in Florida . As you can guess, since I wrote a book about a piece of my own family history, I'm fairly adept at searching through historical records and fighting out information about dead people, and I decided to do a little searching into the historical records to see if I could find anything out about Mrs. U . I wanted to understand what made that woman tick. Mrs. U has indeed passed away and has been dead for a number of years now. It didn't take me any time at all to find Mrs. U'S records, and in them I saw her birth name. This is sometimes called her maiden name, regardless of what you call it, it's the name she was born with, not the name that she went by. After her marriage, not only was I able to confirm that she was indeed of Eastern European ethnicity, her ancestors were from a village not terribly far from my own paternal ancestors in Slovakia. Mrs. U was one of us after all, and later when I located her family's census records where they list the parents occupations, I could tell by where she lived and what her parents did that she too was working class just like her students, but I'm guessing she was ashamed of her roots and ashamed of where she came from, and she hitched her wagon to her more Mayflower e sounding surname of the family that she married into. My goodness. I know this is a heavy topic, but I've always wondered what causes people to act like that. Specifically, what caused Mrs. Oo to make the choices she made? I can always speculate, but in reality I will never know. But what a story, huh? That's all I have for the moment to explain this woman's strange behavior, but this is one thing I've learned. For me, the most healing thing that I can do for myself and sometimes for others when I've been on the receiving end of something like this is to write the story or to tell the story if only to myself. I don't necessarily have to publish it or broadcast it or put it on some social media, but once it's no longer living in my head, it's living elsewhere and it doesn't have the sting, it doesn't have the power, but I guess that's what healing looks like for me, maybe for you as well. But back to writing. When I was a little kid, I was convinced that writing was magic, that writing could make everything better, and you know what happened? As I got older, I have found that this is indeed the case. Writing is magic. Now, it is true that I've changed my definition of what magic is, but regardless, writing is magic, and magic can heal even as a child. I began writing to authors whose works I admired, and I'm happy to report that every author and every poet that I wrote to wrote back. Well, a lot of times those were just form replies, but I still count those. But there were times where I got actual handwritten or typed letters, personal letters that is from the actual writer or poet, and I thought that was so cool. It meant a heck of a lot to me that someone noteworthy, someone whose books I held in my hand was a real living person who cared to write to some kid who was trying to figure out their place in the world. These people, not just their works, but their personal communications with me left a deep imprint on my life. But there was one author in particular who was quite well known , and she and I corresponded for seven years until her death. I'll devote an episode to her because I'm guessing some people know who she is. What remains from that relationship are not just memories, but she was a model for how to be in the world, and I think in my life, I've really tried to make a choice to be more like this author that I admired so much, have I succeeded, not by a long shot. However, when given a choice, I would rather at least try and fail to emulate this amazing person than hold onto the stuff that happened to us courtesy of Mrs. U . But I have to say that Mrs. U was right about one thing. I really am not a Mayflower person, but as of early 2023, I have approximately 4,523 people in my family tree. That's not too shabby. Even without the assistance of the Mayflower, given this very early experience with Mrs. Zoo and the Mayflower and everything else, I was pretty turned off to genealogy, but then a miracle, I probably would have never gotten interested in family history without the gift of a document from my mother's older half sister who was living in Chicago. As she got older, she decided to compile her memories of growing up and of the family, and she created this beautiful 38 page genealogy type written, she sent it to a bunch of relatives, she said, and she later told me that no one replied, and I was her last resort. I know sometimes the last resort turns out to be not such a bad thing. As we say in Minnesota, when I got that document, I stayed up all night reading it. I was riveted. I was hooked in the best possible way. My life was changed from that point onward, and that's what helped me give birth to this book and a lot of other things, and a lot of other spinoffs, I guess you could call them that I had not anticipated. In closing, I want to say that although the Mayflower story was weaponized against a kids once upon a time by a teacher who should have known better, as time has gone on, and as I've worked with genealogists and worked with other people's family histories, I've got a lot of friends who are Mayflower people, and one of my closest friends and I got together and I had no idea about his family history. He came to our house and unfolded this massive family history chart, and then I saw it, the Mayflower reference, and I said, you've gotta be kidding. And I told him the story and he laughed so hard. He said, oh my gosh, I'm just a regular schmuck. And I said, I know, and so am I. And I must say this again. Family history is for everyone. It doesn't matter who you are, and for sure some family histories are more difficult to trace than others, but hear me now, never, ever, ever give up. Okay? That is if you want to do your family history, because this is a really good time to delve into your history. No matter who you are, no matter where you came from, you do have a history, and I want to learn about your history. So make sure to get those records and those stories and those photos in place. The fact is no one knows whose life will be changed by the family history work that you are doing. Now, I'm a living testimony to that. Yes, it is hard, but it is so fun too. And let me tell you, it is so worth it. Now, remember to stay curious. You storytellers, you story keepers , you know who you are, and when I come back next time, I'll start talking about a family tale untold the first chapter in my book, flower in the River. But this time I had to set the stage for the most improbable journey about how I became a family historian. Goodbye for now. Hey, that's it for this episode, and thanks for coming along for the ride. Please subscribe or follow so you can keep up with all the episodes. For more information, please go to my website, that's www flower in the river.com, and I'll have that and more information in the show notes. I hope you consider buying my book because I owe people money, and I'm just kidding about that. But the one thing I'm not kidding about is that this podcast and my book are dedicated to the memory of the 844 who died on the Eastland goodbye for now .

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Natalie Zett

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