Join Me in Today's Adventure: In this episode, we're diving deep into the fascinating world of genealogy, exploring how unexpected synchronicities and age-old premonitions weave through our search for ancestral connections. I'll share stories and insights into how these mystical elements have surfaced in my research, particularly in relation to the Eastland Disaster.
What's in Store for You:
The curious phenomenon of premonitions and synchronicities encountered during genealogical research.
A closer look at the Eastland Disaster and its mysterious premonitions.
Personal anecdotes illustrating these eerie yet captivating experiences.
Reflecting on the profound impact these unexplained events have on understanding our past.
The role of intuition and 'gut feelings' in guiding our genealogical journeys.
Why This Matters: Unraveling our family histories is more than just dates and names; it's about connecting with stories and experiences that transcend time. Sometimes, our quest leads us to unexplained phenomena that challenge our understanding but enrich our journey.
Episode Highlights:
Insights into the most startling premonitions related to the Eastland Disaster.
My own experiences of unexpected discoveries and the 'aha' moments in my genealogical research.
Discussing the lasting impact of the Eastland Disaster on families and communities.
Connect and Share: I would love to hear your stories and experiences with synchronicities and premonitions in your own genealogical adventures. Reach out through my website or social media!
Join Me in Today's Adventure: In this episode, we're diving deep into the fascinating world of genealogy, exploring how unexpected synchronicities and age-old premonitions weave through our search for ancestral connections. I'll share stories and insights into how these mystical elements have surfaced in my research, particularly in relation to the Eastland Disaster.
What's in Store for You:
The curious phenomenon of premonitions and synchronicities encountered during genealogical research.
A closer look at the Eastland Disaster and its mysterious premonitions.
Personal anecdotes illustrating these eerie yet captivating experiences.
Reflecting on the profound impact these unexplained events have on understanding our past.
The role of intuition and 'gut feelings' in guiding our genealogical journeys.
Why This Matters: Unraveling our family histories is more than just dates and names; it's about connecting with stories and experiences that transcend time. Sometimes, our quest leads us to unexplained phenomena that challenge our understanding but enrich our journey.
Episode Highlights:
Insights into the most startling premonitions related to the Eastland Disaster.
My own experiences of unexpected discoveries and the 'aha' moments in my genealogical research.
Discussing the lasting impact of the Eastland Disaster on families and communities.
Connect and Share: I would love to hear your stories and experiences with synchronicities and premonitions in your own genealogical adventures. Reach out through my website or social media!
Hello, I'm Natalie Zett and welcome to Flower in the River. This 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. Why? Hello, this is Natalie Zett, and welcome to 2024. I hope it's going well for you. The voice you just heard was that of John Newland. He was the host of a program that was similar to the Twilight Zone, but not quite as popular, called One Step Beyond, and so you're given a foreshadowing of what this episode will be about.
Natalie Zett:
Have you ever had a premonition, that inexplicable gut feeling that urges you to tread lightly or steer clear from a person, place or situation? It's actually a common thread in the tapestry of human experiences yet, for whatever reason, it's often dismissed or forgotten. And on the flip side, have you ever felt those moments, those golden moments where everything aligns, guiding you to effortlessly do what you need to do next? You know that feeling. It's kind of like you're on a roll. That is what I like to call the Dance of Synchronicity or Serendipity. I'm not sure why these words all begin with S, but it really makes it fun when you're doing a recording. Anyway, these unexplained experiences, be they supernatural or simply beyond our current understanding, add an undeniable zest to life. I mean, despite the fact that these experiences are often dismissed, why is the Twilight Zone so important to us and so popular all these many years after Rod Serling's death in 1975? That series lives on because it speaks to us somehow. I think of the Twilight Zone as the one of the modern era that is just so iconic, so timeless. We need assurance sometimes in our lives that we are connected to something beyond ourselves.
Natalie Zett:
Mainstream society may scoff at such phenomena or tell those of us who've had these experiences that were crazy, etc. Not all cultures are so quick to dismiss. Okay, so take my father's heritage, for example. My Eastern European grandparents brought with them a rich tradition of folk religion and mysticism, from conversing with spirits to divining the future to all kinds of interesting stuff in between, including a lot of telekinetic events. My cousins can talk better about that, but, needless to say, growing up was not a dull experience, especially when I was around this group of relatives and these practices were my childhood backdrop, although I have to say, kind of sadly, that as I grew up and moved away from my family, I learned to keep this part of my life all to myself If I wasn't being ridiculed for this sort of thing.
Natalie Zett:
There was also a suspicion that anybody who dabbled in these types of practices was dangerous, so I also learned, for personal safety's sake, to keep this to myself, and I also think and I was talking with some of my cousins about this it wasn't as if anyone sat down and taught us to be discreet, but they were very discreet. They were not grandstanders. However, many of our older relatives were well known in our hometown of Johnstown, pennsylvania, as the people that you would go to if you needed to contact the dead, if you needed some kind of healing potion, if you needed some type of recipe. Those were the people you went to, and it was strictly word of mouth. And so I did learn to be discreet and careful and, honestly, since it wasn't really a part of my day to day existence, I just thought well, that was an interesting childhood, but life goes on.
Natalie Zett:
Yet, years later, it was those very experiences that resurfaced and they transformed my journey when I was in the midst of first discovering my mother's family's history, with the Eastland disaster and I'm talking again about 25 years ago and what began as a family history research project sparked a deeper curiosity in me. And as these odd experiences began unfolding and coming on rapid fire, that suggested strongly to me that there was a lot more to this story than I initially thought. Those early encounters that I could not explain or explain away were really difficult to experience and somewhat frightening and even more difficult to write about. When I thought about putting together a book of some sort about this family experience, it was actually safer for me, emotionally, to write about them as fiction. But I have to say that every experience of the supernatural nature in my book it happened the way I described it telekinetic events and all and you'll have to read the book to find out about that, because I've referenced it several times in the podcast and I don't want to keep going over it, especially now that the book is available in audio. Yes, indeed. Anyway, let me get back to this experience. Great, thank you.
Natalie Zett:
So in the latter part of 2023, which at this point is not that long ago I had a feeling another feeling that I could not shake off that I had more stories to tell, and this wasn't just confined to my family's history or my family's stories. As I was researching and looking at publications around the Eastland disaster, there were so many people who had been reduced to just names and dates and I felt bad about that. I thought it's as if they never lived and I wanted to bring them out of the shadows and into the spotlight, where they belong. They lived at one point, they were important, and the trouble is when you just see names and dates, you're not generally drawn into it, unless you're somehow connected to those names and dates. So I'd done genealogy long enough by this point in my life to know how to do that deeper and sometimes exhaustive dive into records and newspapers to find information about people. And I was convinced that each one of these people, even if there was only a paragraph or two about them in their obituary, someplace it at least, was more than just their names and the dates that were assigned to them at birth and at death, and I was determined to get more information about them.
Natalie Zett:
About the same time, I also had this feeling about Chicago of 1915. I somehow had to reconstruct it, and that seemed impossible, right but I just thought I have to do this. I have to at least make an attempt at creating the world in which all of these people lived, because the Eastland disaster isn't just an event, a one-time thing that happened. It happened in a place and it affected a bunch of people, and these people were all parts of different communities, different religions, different everything. They were different, but they all shared this thing they were alive in Chicago in 1915. And the trouble is, I didn't know how to start, but I started anyway.
Natalie Zett:
So I dove in to create my first story outside of my family, and that was the first week in November of 2023. And I locked onto these two brothers called Herman and William Ristow, and their story, with its post-tragedy legal battles, got me to thinking and it became the unintentional chapter of what I'm now calling the Eastland Chronicles. And I thought this is going to be an occasional thing that I talk about other people involved in the Eastland disaster. But as I kept rifling through papers mostly papers and I kept finding more and more and more people to talk about, every week since early November until now, I have talked about lives that, as far as I know, haven't been created. They've chronicled deeply Some of them already have, but very few of them have, and certainly the communities around them, such as the Polish community in Chicago at that point and the Lithuanian community in Chicago in 1915, that wasn't.
Natalie Zett:
It was covered, but it wasn't covered in a single place, and my goal for this, besides making sure that everyone gets a chance to have their story told, is to also make this accessible to people. It doesn't help you if you're doing research and you have to go to this organization for this record or this website for another record or whatever. So, as much as possible, I promise that I will put all the information I'm locating on my website so, in case you or any of the relatives of any of these people go hunting, they will hopefully find a one stop shopping experience here where they can find as many records as possible on my website. And just this week, I added a couple of new articles about some people I'd previously profiled, including Catherine McIntyre. Do you remember her? She was the young woman who saved her brother and her mother in the Eastland disaster, and she went on to live a long life, a life of service, after that, and I found an additional article about Catherine. Put it on my website. So make sure you're visiting my website regularly and if you're not doing that, please sign up for my newsletter, because I do put a newsletter out each week with my findings and things like that, and even if you don't read the whole newsletter, the information is there for you to refer to. So please do that.
Natalie Zett:
Back to the Eastland Chronicles. It has now become a regular part of Flower in the River podcast, and so every week, for as long as I have information, I will add a new piece of the puzzle. This week I'm jazzed and excited to share some premonition stories I found in the newspapers that pertained to the Eastland disaster. There are so many that I probably will have to split this particular podcast into two or maybe even more episodes. I kid you not. There are so many stories I can't. I really can't believe it.
Natalie Zett:
But before we go there, how about a quick detour into something that's also a bit mysterious, a synchronicity that happened to me recently. A few days ago I felt compelled to look at my profile for my Aunt, martha Pfeiffer on my family tree again to see if there are any new records, and that seemed kind of a goofy thing to do, because I seldom search on her, since the likelihood of finding anything new is well nil. I mean, as I was writing the book about Martha and my family, I did what I consider extensive and exhausting research and I found everything I thought you could find out. A few days ago, I searched for her again on ancestrycom and, believe it or not, something popped up, something I'd never seen before. It was my Aunt Martha's death record from the registry of the family church, and that would be St Mark's Lutheran Church in Chicago. I have to say that seeing her name in that yellowed ledger book took my breath away and it once again brought home the reality of the Eastland disaster to me, as if I needed that again. And it also, strangely enough, felt like the very first time that I embarked on this journey, looking for her, 25 years ago when I first learned about her.
Natalie Zett:
And the record is written in German, and here is what it says Martha Pfeiffer, 24th July 1915, death 27th July 1915, burial age 19 years, two months, 11 days. Cause of death Eastland disaster, called in German Unglück. This is the umlat over the U Unglück disaster in German. Survived by her mother mother, four sisters, two brothers and the pastor who was handling the funeral arrangements was pastor. It looks like Simon S-I-E-M-A-N. Possibly Now this is just a case of the handwriting being difficult to read, but everything else is pretty clear on that page. But hold on. There are two additional women who were members of our family's church, who also died on the Eastland with Martha, and I will tell you about them.
Natalie Zett:
But first, I was so excited about this find and I wanted to share it with someone, and I know not that many well, hardly any people get excited about this, except there are about 79,000 people who are members of this one genealogy Facebook group and I knew that at least one or two people would appreciate the document that I found, so I shared it there. So I posted my finding, posted the image, and so many of them responded with such encouraging words and I got such wonderful feedback. And several people thanked me because, number one, they'd never heard of the Eastland disaster and, number two, this gave them hope because, as they are searching for their own people, they have hit brick walls, and my discovering yet something new after all this time gave them the feeling that someday they too will discover something new and they just need to keep on with the search, even though many days, quite often, it seems to be that nothing happens. Something is happening. But, please remember, since the pandemic and people had a lot more time to do digitization, scanning, etc. Of records, we do have a lot more records than we've had previously and, although it's ideal to go to the sources where these events happened, not everyone can travel around the country or around the world to get these records. So we really do have to rely on these online resources and I'm so glad that more and more of them are coming into being so we can locate them.
Natalie Zett:
So let me tell you about these two additional women who are listed in St Mark's Lutheran Church's death record. The first one is Hedwig Steffen, s-t-e-f-f-e-n is the spelling of the name. And, wouldn't you know it, hedwig and I have the same birthday. She's a little older, but she was born on October 21st 1890, in Germany. Her father, john, was 28, and her mother, augusto, was 37.
Natalie Zett:
A little bit of searching on Hedwig, or Hattie, I think. As she was also known, her mother was married previously and widowed, so she had several children from that marriage. So actually Heddie had a pretty big family in terms of siblings, and Heddie was an employee of Western Electric and 25 years old when she died. What's interesting about this as well, her dad died two years later, in 1917, and her mom died 10 years later, 1925. At that point her mom was living with another daughter and her family and according to the 1920 census, her mom could not speak English. And I was thinking about this family, how, number one, people can die of a broken heart and I've seen this so much with the Eastland disaster, where, particularly the parents they'll live after the event of the Eastland. Some go on for quite a while, but quite a few seem to die shortly after the Eastland disaster. And so the Eastland disaster took a lot more people with it than I think we even realize. And also the other thing about Heddie's mother the fact that she couldn't speak English, could only speak German. I wondered how that limited her and perhaps isolated her. Goodness knows, there were a lot of people in Chicago at that point who comprised the German community, but I still think that might have limited her world in some ways. Perhaps Now the other person she is listed below, martha, and her name is Edna Will Pinkall.
Natalie Zett:
She was 16 and married, and this is a quote from a person who wrote on Fyndegrave. Their first name is initial C, last name Magavero, and they wrote that only 16 days after her marriage to Edward Fred Pinkall, edna Pinkall Ne Will died in the Eastland disaster in Chicago. There's no reference to what happened with Edward if he was aboard the Eastland. I'm still researching Edna, so I'll report on her as I find things, but this is also an incredibly sad story. Edna was just, let's see, 16 years, eight months, eight days old, and she was survived by her husband and her parents. Now I didn't expect to have a synchronicity story for you, but there it is. One more thing that interests me, the researcher side of me is that these two women were buried in Concordia Cemetery I think it's in Forest Park Illinois and my aunt was buried in Bethania Cemetery, which is in Justice, illinois.
Natalie Zett:
Why I don't know, but that's something worth researching as well, and I hope this little story helps you feel encouraged in your own search of that's what you're doing and lets you know that this really is the long game and don't give up. You will find something eventually Sometimes. Realize that it doesn't always happen rapid fire. I mean mine has been kind of this dance of just an avalanche of information, an avalanche of findings, and then nothing, and then it goes on kind of in a lull and then it picks up again as it has since I made the decision to bring the lives of other people who are involved in the Eastland disaster into our consciousness. So I really wanted to talk about premonitions, because I found so dang many in various newspapers and I don't think they've ever been talked about in one place. So I shall begin.
Natalie Zett:
The first premonition story I'm going to share is from a person I've already introduced you to. If you remember, a few episodes ago I profiled the Lithuanian community in Chicago in 1915 post-Eastland disaster, and one of the stories featured a young woman called I'll say her name in English Josephine Rosinski is her name. I'm afraid I have such trouble with Lithuanian, but I'm going to give it a go here because I'm going to read an article that I translated from the 27 July 1915 issue of Catilicus, which was one of the many Lithuanian language papers in Chicago. The story is important because premonitions figure heavily in it. Here's the story, here's the article, and please again forgive my mispronunciation Jos Rosinski, aka Josephine Rosinski.
Natalie Zett:
She was a young, 17 year old girl of pure manners. The unfortunate girl drowned last Saturday in the Chicago River aboard the ship Eastland. This tragic event has left long lasting tears, sorrows and despair. Josephine Rosinski, just blooming like a tender flower, encountered humanity for the first time in such a drastic way and a sudden, horrific death took her. Who can compensate her parents, brothers, etc. Who can stop the heartbreak?
Natalie Zett:
That day, early in the morning, the unfortunate girl, as if foreseeing her own tragedy, spent her last hours of life going on a picnic. Listen to this part. She left home three times and came back feeling uneasy each time. I'm going to repeat that. She left home three times and came back feeling uneasy each time. Something was bothering her. Since it started raining that morning, her mother suggested she would be better off staying home. She also warned her about the potential dangers of water. However, josephine kissed her mother goodbye, replying that she was not afraid of death. She said that death comes to everyone eventually. After her departure, her mother was very anxious.
Natalie Zett:
A few hours later, news of the tragedy spread quickly throughout the city. More than a thousand women, girls, men, young men and children perished. Among them was also Josephine Ruschinski. The workers of the Catelikus newspaper sent a floral wreath to the coffin of Josephine Ruschinski. They also sent words of sympathy to the deceased's parents and family. The funeral will take place the day after tomorrow, from St George's Church in Bridgeport to St Casimir's Cemetery. The funeral arrangements are being handled by the undertaker, mr P Masika. Eternal rest Grant unto the young Lithuanian girl. That is the end of the article.
Natalie Zett:
Here's the thing. As you probably know, 1,000 people did not die, at least directly in the Eastland, although it's probably actually higher when you think of all the people who were affected by this and whose lives were most likely shortened because they experienced this event, even if they didn't die directly from it. The other thing was, josephine left and came back three times. She felt something, obviously, and this is what her mother reported, and this is not the only story like this, by the way, and I'll share other stories that are similar and you might be thinking well, why didn't she just listen to her intuition? This is 1915. Josephine worked for Western Electric and she, like so many, probably felt they had no choice but to go on this picnic. Many of them were told that if they did not attend this picnic they would lose their jobs.
Natalie Zett:
I got frustrated with this too early on when I was talking with my aunt Pearl. This was back in the late 1990s, and she was the one who wrote the family history with all this information, and I too did not understand what was going on. Back then. I said why did these people not rebel? Why didn't they rise up and do something and say something? After this happened, and although there was a lot of labor unrest during that time, my aunt Pearl said look, you don't understand. It's not like it is now. People didn't have rights. They were really just basically kind of held captive by their employers. Not to say that that still doesn't happen. Of course it does, but the kind of rights that we, at least in the United States, take for granted were not in place then, and sometimes, oftentimes. That is why it's good to look at history and realize how far we've come.
Natalie Zett:
I would always encourage people to not take their sensibilities of the 21st century and apply it to these people and judge them. Please be slow to judge and quicker to understand when it comes to this sort of thing, because it's much more complicated than any of us realize, and as much time as I've spent studying this, I can't even pretend that I fully comprehended, because I wasn't alive. Then. I can only use my gifts of empathy, research and everything else to try to recreate it, but at best it's a facsimile of what was. It's not what was, it's what was. That's never going to stop me from trying, because the more I try the more help I get from the Earth plane and perhaps beyond. That remains to be seen.
Natalie Zett:
I must say that these discoveries whether it's my own synchronistic finding of a record are finding out about so many people who were involved with the Eastland, who had premonitions. This stuff took me right back to the early days of when I first learned about this part of my own family history and I set out ready to discover more. It was thrilling and frustrating because I had not a clue how to do any of this type of research, but then I would feel something. Finally, on, it would say, drive to this very small town of 1000 people. And so I did, and there, within that little town, I found documents related to my family. Or I drove to the cemetery that I'd never been to, where my Aunt Martha and my great-grandparents and other relatives were buried, and the cemetery was huge. I had no idea how I was going to find my people and, lo and behold, I parked right in front of their graves, but I didn't even see that at first and I wondered do these synchronistic events happen to everyone? Maybe not everyone, but it happens a lot. So many years into my own journey I discovered Hank Z Jones' books on psychic roots in genealogy, where he shares his story and the stories of thousands of other genealogists who were minding their own business, going about their research, and as they researched, the unexplained intervened.
Natalie Zett:
Now do you know Hank Jones? I've talked about him before, but I want to tell you about him again because he's very important. An old descriptor for him might be Renaissance man. Maybe there's something better to call him. He's been an actor. Many might recognize him from the various Disney films of the 60s or the sitcoms such as my Three Sons and the Patty Duke Show from the same era. He was also a songwriter and performer gorgeous singing voice, by the way.
Natalie Zett:
But he'd always been interested in genealogy and he locked and loaded on a group called the Palatine Germans. These are a group of early German settlers who came to America in the 1700s and they settled mainly in New York and Pennsylvania. Hank, as far as he knew, had no connection to this group. He just became obsessed with them, sound familiar, okay, and I'm not sure if he pulled up stakes and relocated from LA to New York, but he ended up spending a lot of time there and, oh yes, the very first person he was researching in that group of Palatine Germans turned out to be one of his ancestors.
Natalie Zett:
What I like about Hank besides the fact he's so gracious he and I have corresponded on and off. He never tries to explain these occurrences, but he says just enjoy it. How good of a genealogist is he? Well, hank is good enough to have been recognized as an expert, if not the expert, on the history of the Palatine Germans. He's written a ton of books. The man is just amazing.
Natalie Zett:
And also Hank has this designation after his name F like Frank A, s like Sam G, fellow of the American Society of Genealogists. And just so you know, this is a very big deal in genealogy circles. The American Society of Genealogists, that's ASG, is pretty darn exclusive, and becoming a Fellow and that's what Hank is is a mark of high distinction. It's by invitation only, based on significant contributions to the field of genealogy through publications, teaching or other relevant activities. Being a past president, as he was, of ASG is like a cherry on top, showing deep involvement and recognition from the community. So that's who he is. So he proudly owns all aspects of genealogical research, including the psychic element, and I thought I'd let Hank describe in his own words what his journey has been like, and this is from an interview he did several years ago with Sharon Carmack.
Speaker 3:
Here's Hank, and so I think it is our job, if that's the word, to write it down about all of our ancestors and all of the people that interacted with them. That's what we all try to do. It's a great feeling, you know. I think someone said, from a metaphysical point of view what the heck are we doing dealing with dead people? Why do we do this?
Speaker 3:
What's going on here and the reason that came back from a lot of people was you know why we do it? It's because we do it, and more than that, it's what we're supposed to do. So we do it, and what we try to do too, I think, is you've got to put, first of all, you've got a skeleton that names and dates. But again, it's part of our job to put flesh and blood on the skeleton of names and dates and make them come alive, and so you get your diaries and your pictures and your journals and anything that makes these people three-dimensional and that's who they were, their people, and that's what the kick is. And of course, it's more fun too to you know, it's great to have an ancestor who fought the revolution or came on the Mayflower, but, for God's sake, you've got to honor the horse thief too.
Natalie Zett:
How's that for a closing quote? You've been listening to Hank Jones, who reminds you of a lot of important things in genealogy, including you've got to honor the horse thief too. Thanks for joining me on this journey and I'll talk to you next week. Take care Bye, 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 wwwflowerintherivercom. I hope you'll consider buying my book, available now as audiobook, ebook, paperback and hardcover, 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.