Latest / Stories That Live In Us / The Magic Part Is The Listening (with Natalie Zett) | Episode 45

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The Magic Part Is The Listening (with Natalie Zett) | Episode 45 · Stories That Live In Us

0:02
Natalie Zett: They all deserve to have their stories told, whether they're the young Greek immigrant guy that just has a little obituary or whatever, or entire families, or the ones and twos that just kind of got lost.
0:13
Natalie Zett: I thought, no, I will tell all your stories.
0:17
Crista Cowan: Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future.
0:25
Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
0:29
Crista Cowan: I've spent my whole life discovering the power of family history, and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything.
0:37
Crista Cowan: My guest today is a woman named Natalie Zett.
0:42
Crista Cowan: Natalie is not a traditional genealogist.
0:48
Crista Cowan: She has a master's degree in theology.
0:48
Crista Cowan: She was in journalism as her career.
0:50
Crista Cowan: She comes from not just a strong journalistic background educationally, but also in her family tree, and when she discovered an aunt who had died in a very unknown tragedy, she became obsessed with this particular tragedy, so much so that she started a podcast and written a book about all of the people that died on the Chicago River in this particular boat crash.
1:18
Crista Cowan: And so today she's going to tell us a little bit about how she made the discovery of this tragedy and then what she's doing to make sure that the stories of those victims are told.
1:28
Crista Cowan: I hope you'll enjoy my conversation with Natalie Zett.
1:31
Crista Cowan: Well, tell me about you.
1:33
Natalie Zett: I don't know that I'm that interesting, but some of the things that have happened to me are and this Eastland, the reason I reached out to you is because of the number of coincidences, which I can't even count anymore serendipities, synchronicities.
1:50
Natalie Zett: I took a lot of Jungian psychology in undergrad, so that comes forth.
1:52
Natalie Zett: But I'm somebody who was told when I was in elementary school that I didn't have a family history.
1:57
Natalie Zett: Because I'll explain.
1:59
Natalie Zett: It's actually comical, it's funny now.
2:01
Natalie Zett: But we went to I'm from Johnstown, pennsylvania, and the family moved to Cleveland and we went to an inner-city Cleveland school.
2:09
Natalie Zett: Most of the kids were like me, immigrants, children, grandchildren from Eastern Europe, southern Italy, and the rest of the kids were Black, from the South.
2:18
Natalie Zett: And then there were some Jewish children whose parents or grandparents were Holocaust survivors, jewish children whose parents or grandparents were Holocaust survivors.
2:26
Natalie Zett: The teacher told us and this is okay, abandon logic for a moment that we had to trace, we had to do a family tree and we had to trace our family back to the Mayflower.
2:33
Natalie Zett: And oh, it gets better.
2:35
Natalie Zett: And she told me that I wasn't a real American unless I could do that.
2:41
Natalie Zett: A teacher told you that, what's interesting, krista is years later.
2:45
Natalie Zett: Now she's joined the angels.
2:47
Natalie Zett: Wherever she is now, I did her bio.
2:49
Natalie Zett: She's from the same village in Slovakia, that's adjacent to the one where my grandfather, my paternal grandfather, came from, olsavica, and I thought, huh, you had a little self-acceptance trouble.
3:02
Natalie Zett: But so I went home to my mother and she was so tired of getting called down to the school.
3:07
Natalie Zett: She spent more time in that school than I did, actually talking to the teachers because I was always just asking questions.
3:13
Natalie Zett: But I said, mom, am I not a real American?
3:16
Natalie Zett: And she said oh, for God's sake, yes, you're a real American.
3:18
Natalie Zett: I said, well, I have to do a family tree.
3:20
Natalie Zett: And she said we can't because all of my parents, your daddy's parents, they came from Europe.
3:28
Natalie Zett: All the records were burned in the war we don't know which war, we don't know where.
3:31
Natalie Zett: We don't have a family history.
3:32
Natalie Zett: And then there was that, and so I went back and I told the teacher and I guess we got away with that.
3:39
Natalie Zett: But I thought, oh, I'm one of those people where somebody tells me something like that.
3:43
Natalie Zett: It's like I don't think so, but I'm going to prove you wrong someday.
3:47
Natalie Zett: Then, about the same time and my mother also got called down when I wrote a short story called the Mummy's Hand.
3:52
Natalie Zett: I was in third grade and we could write a short story and the teacher was concerned because a little girl shouldn't be writing stories about a person using a manuscript to bring back somebody from the dead and I got in trouble for that.
4:07
Natalie Zett: And my mother just said, oh, for God's sake, natalie, don't keep doing this stuff.
4:10
Natalie Zett: And I said I don't understand.
4:13
Natalie Zett: Why am I in trouble?
4:14
Natalie Zett: This is what daddy's family does, my dad's family, very different from my mother's family.
4:19
Natalie Zett: Most of them were still living in Johnstown, but they were from what is now Slovakia, but really their ancestry was mixed of.
4:23
Natalie Zett: Them were still living in Johnstown, but they were from what is now Slovakia, but really their ancestry was mixed Romani, carpatho-rusyn, which is what my dad's dad was.
4:32
Natalie Zett: Yeah, like Andy Warhol and a smattering of other things Ashkenazi Slovaks.
4:36
Natalie Zett: We had the different religions, the different folk, magic things, and Christianity didn't come to those areas until much later.
4:43
Natalie Zett: I don't know that, people know that.
4:45
Natalie Zett: So it was a real infusion of different things, and Christianity didn't come to those areas until much later.
4:47
Natalie Zett: I don't know that, people know that.
4:48
Natalie Zett: So it was a real infusion of different things and so a lot of the way that my family made a living when they came to Johnstown was the things you might expect fortune telling horses, what else?
4:58
Natalie Zett: Tinsmith, my dad was a musician and so things like that.
5:02
Natalie Zett: So I didn't think anything about that.
5:03
Natalie Zett: But my mom said you could get hurt.
5:07
Natalie Zett: And I didn't know what she meant by that.
5:09
Natalie Zett: But she just said just be careful when you talk about this stuff with whom you talk about that.
5:13
Natalie Zett: But my dad had an over let's just say an overdramatic sister who said darling, don't worry about that.
5:19
Natalie Zett: She said the living, the dead, we see them all.
5:22
Natalie Zett: It's part of our heritage.
5:23
Natalie Zett: But I did learn as I went on in life to maybe keep a lid on that stuff.
5:30
Natalie Zett: But what happened was two things the power of a manuscript to bring something back to life and also the fact that when somebody tells you you don't have a family history, don't believe them.
5:41
Natalie Zett: Right?
5:42
Natalie Zett: So I shouldn't be a genealogist.
5:46
Natalie Zett: I'm not the genealogist that you and so many are, but I'm pretty good at it.
5:50
Natalie Zett: I figured out how to do it and that's how I've been able to unlock a lot of this Eastland disaster stuff.
5:55
Natalie Zett: So mom's history was this, and this is what's significant for my Eastland involvement my mom's mother died when my mom was three and there was a lot of back and forth.
6:05
Natalie Zett: At that point they were living in Johnstown but my grandmother this was her second marriage.
6:09
Natalie Zett: She left Chicago in 1929 to marry my grandfather, her second marriage.
6:15
Natalie Zett: The first guy was a goof, abusive and that sort of thing, and she had two older children.
6:20
Natalie Zett: My grandmother was working for Western Electric during the time of the Eastland disaster and I'll explain what that was.
6:26
Natalie Zett: Western Electric was probably like the Silicon Valley of its day.
6:30
Natalie Zett: They did everything having to do with communications.
6:33
Natalie Zett: My grandmother was a laborer, but what I learned later is that she left Chicago to escape heartbreak and guilt.
6:40
Natalie Zett: So she was pregnant with her first little girl.
6:46
Natalie Zett: She already had a child and she was supposed to go on this excursion across Lake Michigan.
6:52
Natalie Zett: Every year Western Electric had a big, big excursion thing going for its employees.
6:57
Natalie Zett: So all these I think about 7,000 people showed up at the docks down.
7:01
Natalie Zett: If you know Chicago, between Clark and LaSalle, you can't fit in there now, but at that time it was just, you know, massive big deal.
7:08
Natalie Zett: Everybody's all dressed up.
7:09
Natalie Zett: It was a Saturday morning, july 24th 1915.
7:14
Natalie Zett: And my grandma was feeling sick, so she gave her tickets to her little sister who was 19.
7:18
Natalie Zett: And she said you go on at, martha, I don't feel well.
7:22
Natalie Zett: So Martha and her girlfriend left.
7:23
Natalie Zett: They were living in South Lawndale area known as Little Village now.
7:27
Natalie Zett: They got on the streetcar, went down, got on, and the Eastland already had a troubled history of listing meaning it would go back and forth and back and forth.
7:37
Natalie Zett: They had some close calls earlier and the thing rolled Within seven minutes.
7:43
Natalie Zett: All these people were just plunged to one side, right near the dock too.
7:47
Natalie Zett: That's what's so crazy.
7:48
Natalie Zett: Some people were able to just walk away if they were up, you know, above, but a lot of the girls who were, all you know, dressed up and everything, they went down below because it was raining, they didn't want to get messed up and things like that.
8:00
Natalie Zett: So my 19-year-old aunt was one of the casualties of this thing, and so that's where that started and my grandmother blamed herself.
8:10
Crista Cowan: Were you raised knowing about your Aunt Martha at all Like did you even know she existed?
8:18
Natalie Zett: I would not have known the little baby that my grandmother was pregnant with.
8:22
Natalie Zett: She was born, grew up in Chicago and she became a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and a few other things, and I was not close to my mother's family.
8:33
Natalie Zett: I mean, I love my dad's family, but with very good reasons.
8:36
Natalie Zett: What I knew of my mother's family my grandfather, her dad and his family I love my granddad, but the rest of them ugh, and I didn't want to know anything about them.
8:45
Natalie Zett: So I didn't know about.
8:46
Natalie Zett: I knew I had a grandmother.
8:47
Natalie Zett: I knew I had an aunt that was killed on a ferry boat accident.
8:50
Natalie Zett: But no, it was 1997.
8:54
Natalie Zett: My Aunt, pearl, the oldest the little baby, is now in her 80s and she decided she needed to write this family history.
9:00
Natalie Zett: No one cared about it and she was talking to my mother and she said give it to Natalie.
9:05
Natalie Zett: I was in St Paul, I had graduated from Luther Seminary a few years before and got a job in IT, because when you graduate from Hogwarts, what do you do?
9:12
Natalie Zett: You got to get something you know normal.
9:14
Natalie Zett: So I was working and still a journalist and I got this thing a year after my dad died.
9:22
Natalie Zett: My Aunt Pearl sent this thing to me and I thought she was dead for one thing.
9:26
Natalie Zett: And she said I bet you're surprised to hear from me.
9:29
Natalie Zett: I thought, god, no kidding.
9:30
Natalie Zett: And then I started opening this thing up I didn't know who any of these people were and backtracking a little bit.
9:37
Natalie Zett: Krista, I had been to Chicago a number of times.
9:40
Natalie Zett: One of my closest friends, who's turned out actually to be a second cousin we didn't know that either.
9:51
Natalie Zett: Thank you Ancestry she took me through, and every time I'd go to Chicago I thought, god, this seems familiar, even my moves.
9:53
Natalie Zett: I ended up following in the footsteps of this, my Aunt Martha, without knowing it, and it gets more convoluted.
9:59
Natalie Zett: But that's where this thing started, and I was a journalist so I certainly knew how to research, didn't know a whole heck of a lot about doing genealogy, but my Aunt Pearl said well, forgive me, krista, but she said the Mormons have this thing called on the computer.
10:16
Natalie Zett: It's called FamilySearch.
10:18
Natalie Zett: I think you should look that up, they might be able to help.
10:20
Natalie Zett: So she was ahead of me, even in her 80s, and I said, okay, so, but Krista, I had no clue.
10:26
Natalie Zett: I was like all thumbs.
10:27
Natalie Zett: So I just started looking and I thought, and I looked at the movements through this document.
10:33
Natalie Zett: One of the other significant things is that family my great-great-grandmother and her children so the part of them went off to Chicago.
10:42
Natalie Zett: This part stayed only about an hour and a half from where I had moved.
10:47
Natalie Zett: When I first came up here, everything seemed familiar and it was so far removed from Johnstown or Cleveland, ann Arbor where I went to school, or Detroit where I lived.
10:56
Natalie Zett: There was nothing like it.
10:57
Natalie Zett: Yet I knew it and it was just this feeling of this is where I belong.
11:01
Natalie Zett: Yep, they'll carry me out in the box here, and so that was going on.
11:05
Natalie Zett: And so I had Pearl, the manuscript, like the mummy's hand, brought it back to life.
11:11
Natalie Zett: And then when I realized that it wasn't known, I thought what the heck?
11:18
Natalie Zett: So I just started writing articles about her and they got attention from the Minneapolis Star Tribune and things like that.
11:24
Natalie Zett: But I didn't want attention from me.
11:25
Natalie Zett: I thought this is wrong, Just because we're of this class of people and no one was famous or careening into an iceberg.
11:33
Natalie Zett: No, I thought, if I don't stand up for them, I'm not sure who's going to do that.
11:36
Natalie Zett: And there were people that were and are.
11:39
Natalie Zett: But the focus is always on the weapon of murder, the ship.
11:44
Natalie Zett: My focus is who are you?
11:50
Crista Cowan: What was the moment that you realized that you know?
11:53
Crista Cowan: I mean, was it?
11:54
Crista Cowan: It was in the manuscript that Pearl was telling you about this family history?
11:58
Crista Cowan: But when did Martha become a real person for you?
12:02
Natalie Zett: When, when I opened the manuscript thank you for that when I opened the manuscript a little newspaper clipping fell out and I grabbed it and it was.
12:12
Natalie Zett: It was cut off.
12:14
Natalie Zett: It was from the Chicago Herald, july 25th 1915.
12:18
Natalie Zett: There was a row of let's see, I think, three photos.
12:21
Natalie Zett: Three photos below, circled, was Martha Pfeiffer, and I looked and I thought that's my grandmother's last name, her maiden name.
12:31
Natalie Zett: That's where it started and I put this in my book because I made my book fiction, because no one's going to believe this stuff actually happened the way it did.
12:40
Natalie Zett: But I swear that I had seen her before earlier in my life and I remember when we were a little watching the Wizard of Oz or something, and there was a woman coming in and out and I thought who is that?
12:53
Natalie Zett: And you know like my mom said, oh, come on, quit making stuff up.
12:57
Natalie Zett: I said I'm not.
12:58
Natalie Zett: But again, given my family history on my dad's side, my dad's history actually helped me quickly connect.
13:04
Natalie Zett: I thought I know what's going on here.
13:06
Natalie Zett: I don't want this to be happening, but I know.
13:10
Natalie Zett: Because of my experience and because of being related to these people, I knew what was happening and I thought, oh, not now, not a year after my dad died not all this stuff, and I started putting together a family tree because that wasn't so successful in third grade.
13:26
Natalie Zett: But then I would also my journalist rational side would just put all the stuff together and then I would just break down and cry.
13:34
Natalie Zett: I thought, how, how can I go?
13:35
Natalie Zett: Well, not half my life, but how can I go all these years not know this?
13:39
Natalie Zett: And I knew her.
13:41
Natalie Zett: It was just something that I can't explain to you.
13:43
Natalie Zett: And I thought, whatever it takes, I'm going to make sure people know about you.
13:48
Natalie Zett: And I had no idea what I meant and I thought, oh crap, I'm going to become my father's parent, I mean my father's people.
13:55
Natalie Zett: I'm going to be one of those people, but I'm not going to read anyone's palm or anything like that.
13:59
Natalie Zett: But that's how that started.
14:00
Natalie Zett: Did I explain that in a way that makes sense?
14:03
Natalie Zett: Yeah, absolutely yeah.
14:04
Natalie Zett: And you know what?
14:06
Crista Cowan: I completely believe that.
14:08
Natalie Zett: I've had enough experiences myself.
14:10
Crista Cowan: the more you get involved in family history, the more you realize that some of us that are drawn to it are drawn to it because we know those people, because they are present for us and we want to make sure that their stories are told.
14:21
Crista Cowan: So you'd had this experience as a child.
14:24
Crista Cowan: You kind of you mentioned you were following in her footsteps without even knowing it.
14:28
Crista Cowan: But then you open that manuscript, that article falls out, what, like you recognize the surname.
14:35
Crista Cowan: When was it you realized exactly who she was and how she was related to you?
14:39
Natalie Zett: Intellectually right away, you know, but emotionally I was like jello, I could not wrap my mind around it and then I couldn't really talk to anybody about it because it's like but also it was my mother's history and there wasn't much on the Internet.
14:57
Natalie Zett: But then all of a sudden this wonderful website it's long gone now popped up with all this history.
15:03
Natalie Zett: And it was a woman who just loved the stuff.
15:05
Natalie Zett: She was not related to anybody and I printed the stuff out and I looked at it and I kept trying to take it and take it and take it and I sent it to my mother because it was her history.
15:15
Natalie Zett: She knew nothing about her mother and I always felt so bad that she didn't have a mom and she was such a good mom to us and I said, mom, this is who your people are.
15:23
Natalie Zett: She couldn't take it in.
15:25
Natalie Zett: She was very, you know, she also is just, it's so emotional and I thought how could I have this much of my family history not present and not know about it and yet still follow?
15:37
Natalie Zett: These people move to where they moved.
15:38
Natalie Zett: I've met plenty of relatives in Wisconsin in that small village where the people, my great-great-grandmother settled.
15:45
Natalie Zett: They had all the history, they knew it.
15:47
Natalie Zett: They even had a book for the town of a thousand people.
15:50
Natalie Zett: I thought all small towns in Wisconsin came with books, but and that was related to a thousand people.
15:54
Natalie Zett: I thought all small towns in Wisconsin came with books, but and I was related to all these people.
15:56
Natalie Zett: And so, krista, I grew up thinking I was a small family with very few people and we're weird on that side, but who cares too?
16:02
Natalie Zett: I had to expand and I wasn't ready.
16:05
Natalie Zett: I'm still grieving my father, but you know what, ready or not, I had to move.
16:09
Natalie Zett: And I also thought, my God, anybody who would have known her in 1997, 98 would be dead except my.
16:17
Natalie Zett: Her youngest brother was still alive and he lived up in winter Wisconsin, near Hayward, wisconsin, if you know where that is.
16:24
Natalie Zett: He married an indigenous woman and so he was actually kind of well.
16:28
Natalie Zett: He was part of the Dillinger thing in Chicago.
16:30
Natalie Zett: We don't talk much about that, but he but he had to get out of Chicago very quickly at one point and he settled down.
16:36
Natalie Zett: So, yeah, we had some wild people in the family, sounds like it.
16:40
Natalie Zett: But I tried to talk to him but he was just not in a state where he could and then I kept going down to Chicago and spending time with Aunt Pearl that was.
16:51
Natalie Zett: She was hopefully what I can become at some point.
16:53
Natalie Zett: She opened the door and we'd stay up all night.
16:57
Natalie Zett: She was in her eighties.
16:57
Natalie Zett: We'd stay up all night.
16:58
Natalie Zett: She's living in hometown, which is right outside, was one of those places that was built for the returning GIs during World War II.
17:05
Natalie Zett: They built it up Small house, small, humble house, and then she and I would go to the cemeteries and we would find things and she could find everything, and she was just one of those people who had this.
17:17
Natalie Zett: That journalist mind was still there, and so I spent all this time with her and I got to meet some living relatives, including one that was four years old when Aunt Martha was killed and she was still.
17:27
Natalie Zett: This woman was still alive and she said I said I remember her in the coffin.
17:31
Natalie Zett: She had roses in her hair, a pink dress, and that was something else.
17:39
Natalie Zett: And then the one story that I really ought to tell you was the first time I came down to Chicago by myself no sense of direction, gps was not a thing back then and I went to Bethania Cemetery in Justice, illinois, labor Day weekend.
17:54
Natalie Zett: Nobody's there.
17:55
Natalie Zett: It's huge.
17:56
Natalie Zett: It's not as big as Grandview in Johnstown where I was born.
18:00
Natalie Zett: But I thought, oh no, what did I do?
18:03
Natalie Zett: And I felt so foolish and what I didn't realize even after I was traipsing up and down, up and down, up and down, I parked right in front of my family's graves, but I didn't see it.
18:13
Natalie Zett: I still don't know what that is.
18:21
Natalie Zett: Then, when I saw it, I just collapsed.
18:22
Natalie Zett: I said I didn't know you were here, I'm so sorry.
18:23
Natalie Zett: And I was just.
18:24
Natalie Zett: I think I had to be broken down emotionally and I don't think, had my dad not died the previous year, I wouldn't have been open to this, I would have just thrown it in a drawer and said that's nice.
18:34
Natalie Zett: But it was almost as if everything converged and then I thought how did I find this?
18:40
Natalie Zett: And then I went back to, because I was writing a story for a newspaper about this.
18:46
Natalie Zett: So I went back, rushed back.
18:48
Natalie Zett: Then, when I got back to my apartment I guess you will believe this stuff things started happening in my little apartment in St Paul, like stuff falling off of the refrigerator.
18:55
Natalie Zett: We're not on a fault line up here for earthquakes, and it was just.
18:59
Natalie Zett: Things were happening and I thought, oh gosh, what did I do?
19:02
Natalie Zett: And I could feel at that point I was living alone.
19:05
Natalie Zett: I could feel somebody else in there and I thought what did I bring back with me?
19:09
Natalie Zett: And I called my mother because you call mommy when you're scared and I said, mom, I think I brought something back with me from Chicago that I didn't intend.
19:19
Natalie Zett: And she said what's that?
19:20
Natalie Zett: Aunt Martha?
19:20
Natalie Zett: She said well, maybe you did, and she's not going to hurt you.
19:22
Natalie Zett: So get to know her, hang up, you know she was.
19:25
Natalie Zett: My mom was really uncomfortable with a lot of my dad's family shenanigans.
19:29
Natalie Zett: But so I thought let's just pretend this is actually happening, because it is, and I can't talk to anybody, which is the best place to, because I was back in the corner, back in a corner, and I thought let's just go with this.
19:41
Natalie Zett: And I wasn't ready emotionally, I wasn't ready physically, I wasn't ready in any shape to do this.
19:48
Natalie Zett: But I did it.
19:48
Natalie Zett: I just kept going.
19:49
Natalie Zett: I thought let's go to Fall Creek and meet these people, let's go to Chicago, let's do it, and soon.
20:02
Natalie Zett: I had my article done, I had the beginnings of what became a book, because it was like getting so big.
20:04
Natalie Zett: But when the time came where I thought I might really put this together and publish the book.
20:07
Natalie Zett: I was in a car accident or bad one, and it took about eight years to recover memory and things like that back and you don't ever recover from something like that.
20:16
Natalie Zett: But because I had this manuscript and all the details from Pearl's document, it helped my memory come back.
20:22
Natalie Zett: So I thought and then 2016, a couple I work in IT for the state of Minnesota and a couple of friends I was working at the Department of Health said I think you ought to take this thing, this ancestry testing, get your DNA done.
20:36
Natalie Zett: I said, oh, my Aunt, pearl, gave me this information.
20:39
Natalie Zett: I know who my family is.
20:40
Natalie Zett: No, no, you need to do this.
20:41
Natalie Zett: I know who they are.
20:42
Natalie Zett: And then they showed me pie charts and I thought, oh, okay, so I did this thing called the ancestry DNA test.
20:49
Natalie Zett: It's like that in and of itself has been quite the shock, but it also cemented what I found.
20:56
Natalie Zett: So eventually I was able to fill out the things in the book that weren't very good and I thought, when I published the book, I didn't care who wanted it, but I knew my mom had to have it before she died, so I rushed it to her 2021.
21:09
Natalie Zett: She died a few weeks later, but she knew the contents, but she had her book.
21:13
Natalie Zett: I said this is your history, ma, and I didn't want her to depart without that promise being kept.
21:19
Natalie Zett: And Pearl had died quite a few years before.
21:21
Natalie Zett: But I thought Pearl did it.
21:23
Natalie Zett: Pearl said do something with this, do something with this.
21:26
Natalie Zett: I said I did something with it and so that's what happened.
21:31
Natalie Zett: I mean, there's some other things that were occurring, but my moves, the things, and any time I would look up something, I would find it, and it was almost too easy.
21:39
Natalie Zett: But here's where it really switched.
21:42
Natalie Zett: And you asked me about my podcast.
21:44
Natalie Zett: I thought I was done with this because I had to do the audio book and that, if anybody's ever done an audio book, oh, that will bring you to your knees.
21:52
Natalie Zett: It was really tough.
21:53
Natalie Zett: I had to do everything from scratch during the pandemic and I did it.
21:57
Natalie Zett: And then I was on a number of talk shows, including Coast to Coast.
22:02
Natalie Zett: You know sort of the paranormal circuit.
22:04
Natalie Zett: That's where people Amazon put my book as a paranormal book, which I thought was to be a history book.
22:09
Natalie Zett: But I thought, oh well, but I really did not care.
22:13
Natalie Zett: I thought this needs to hit whoever it hits.
22:15
Natalie Zett: I'm not doing this for my ego.
22:17
Natalie Zett: I'm doing this because I kept a promise.
22:19
Natalie Zett: That's all there was to it and I thought I will take care of you and your history.
22:23
Natalie Zett: You don't have to take care of me, I've already.
22:25
Natalie Zett: I know how to do that and people that I was.
22:29
Natalie Zett: When I was on these shows they were asking me questions, like you are, and I thought I never thought of that and I thought, so I have the microphone, did the fricking book?
22:36
Natalie Zett: I thought, well, okay, I'll just do a podcast and answer these things.
22:39
Natalie Zett: And November of last year October of last year maybe I thought I had a sing song voice in my head and I thought, when that happens, it's not going to leave me alone.
22:48
Natalie Zett: It said you've got to expand this world.
22:50
Natalie Zett: There's more to it than this.
22:52
Natalie Zett: You've got to expand the world of Chicago in 1915.
22:55
Natalie Zett: And I thought, oh no, but I did.
22:59
Natalie Zett: I started looking on Google Books and I found a court document from, I think, 1934 about a family, the estate of a family of two brothers who were killed on the Eastland and they were still trying to settle some things.
23:12
Natalie Zett: But it was the surname Ristow.
23:23
Natalie Zett: I'd seen that in my list of DNA matches.
23:24
Natalie Zett: So I thought, oh Lord.
23:24
Natalie Zett: And then I began to do more and more research on different people finding things, and I would look in there's certain places where I would expect to find information about them.
23:31
Natalie Zett: There was nothing.
23:32
Natalie Zett: So I realized if I didn't tell their stories, given the time, given the stuff is buried in Google Books and Hathatrust and weird documents.
23:41
Natalie Zett: I have a list of weird places and eBay.
23:43
Natalie Zett: I found an auction item on eBay that was going for $500.
23:47
Natalie Zett: And I was able to talk them way down out of that a letter from a doctor who was a witness, who wrote to another man who was there and they could.
23:55
Natalie Zett: They, you know, connected years later.
23:57
Natalie Zett: I had a lot of those stories.
23:59
Natalie Zett: So I was finding all this stuff in these, these weird publications and I started talking about them and I thought, wow, and my thing was, I didn't want to get to know them.
24:10
Natalie Zett: I would say I want to know you.
24:12
Natalie Zett: I didn't want to get to know them.
24:13
Natalie Zett: I would say I want to know you, guide me.
24:15
Natalie Zett: They have complied.
24:16
Natalie Zett: And so each week I come up with something that I don't even know what's going to happen.
24:20
Natalie Zett: I do all the research and I always say to folks.
24:24
Natalie Zett: Look, this is my research project for the week.
24:26
Natalie Zett: I'm liable to make mistakes, I'm just that kind of person, but I said they've waited long enough.
24:31
Natalie Zett: The institutions that have been kind of trusted with their history have not done the best job with it, or else they've focused.
24:38
Natalie Zett: What they've done is they focused on the ship and are a few stories, and I thought there are 800 fricking people beyond that.
24:47
Natalie Zett: They all deserve to have their stories told, whether they're the young Greek immigrant guy that just has a little obituary or whatever, or entire families, or the ones and twos that just kind of got lost.
24:59
Natalie Zett: I thought, no, I will tell all your stories.
25:01
Natalie Zett: Don't know how, but I will.
25:03
Natalie Zett: But so far it's been relatively easy to find them and there's no end to this podcast because there's so many of them.
25:11
Natalie Zett: So that's what happened and it's pulled forth from me things I didn't even know I had, because I do everything.
25:17
Natalie Zett: I mean it's just me myself.
25:19
Natalie Zett: I I do all the artwork for the little posters that I make each week to tell the stories, and I'm just a graphic designer.
25:26
Natalie Zett: I'm actually a terrible artist, but I'm a really good graphic designer and I work for corporate doing some of that stuff, and I worked for corporate doing some of that stuff and I thought let's, you know, parlay that into this.
25:34
Natalie Zett: I do the audio, I do the writing and I just want to make sure those stories are out there.
25:40
Natalie Zett: And I got some good news from one of our local institutions here.
25:42
Natalie Zett: It hasn't happened yet.
25:44
Natalie Zett: They want all of my stuff, so at least it can be preserved and I'll be so grateful to have that done, because it's a lot of work done, a lot of documentation and the ghost of Elizabeth Schoen Mills I know she's still alive, but it's just like I hear source citation.
25:58
Natalie Zett: So it's like I'm being on source citation and it's important because there's still a lot of what I found it wasn't source cited.
26:05
Natalie Zett: So I said I can't use that and I bring that up each week because it's like you know what, yeah, I am into.
26:11
Natalie Zett: Some of the people would call the woo stuff, but when I document something it's like I'm going to make sure that this is documented within an inch of its life, because they deserve nothing less and they've had so little, I think because of who they were.
26:28
Crista Cowan: So there's this just really interesting thing that happens, and I think it happens to a lot of people.
26:33
Crista Cowan: Just really interesting thing that happens and I think it happens to a lot of people and and you've laid it out really beautifully because I think, probably because of the way that your journalist brain works that you had this personal connection.
26:42
Crista Cowan: You know Martha was a presence in your life.
26:44
Crista Cowan: You wanted to know and tell her story, which led you to the family story, but it also led you to this Eastland disaster.
26:54
Crista Cowan: And the convergence of those two things, I think, is again something that happens to a lot of people, and it's not always about a disaster, but sometimes it's about a community or it's about a historical moment or like there's something that connects us to more people.
27:29
Crista Cowan: But then you just kind of busting that wide open and being able to then gratefully go back to her and share that with her before she passed over.
27:40
Crista Cowan: But this presence of Aunt Martha, I'm just so fascinated by her and my question, my next question I guess, is like, has she continued to be a presence in your life through this whole experience, or was it just enough to be the catalyst to get you started?
27:56
Natalie Zett: She's she's always here.
27:58
Natalie Zett: I mean, it's like she.
28:00
Natalie Zett: We went my partner is an artist, a fairly well-known artist, and we went to the grave site together.
28:07
Natalie Zett: After she and I got together, gosh, I wish we had done that a little darker, and it could look so much better.
28:24
Natalie Zett: And as we were watching it she said is it my imagination, or is that thing getting darker?
28:27
Natalie Zett: I said no, I don't think it is.
28:29
Natalie Zett: I think it's actually so.
28:31
Natalie Zett: Aunt Martha colors, she's with us.
28:33
Natalie Zett: No, she's very much, I think, with us.
28:36
Natalie Zett: And even I know it was difficult for my sister to kind of wrap her mind around all this, because she's really not the partaking of this.
28:44
Natalie Zett: Firsthand, she's in Ohio, but now she talks about her too.
28:47
Natalie Zett: She goes well, you know, it's talks about her as if she has made her acquaintance and things like that.
28:52
Natalie Zett: I think it was so overwhelming for her emotionally and I allow her her journey, because coming to this stuff is different for everybody.
28:59
Natalie Zett: But yeah, she's always here.
29:01
Natalie Zett: And I think, Krista, she's the one that said you can't stop with me.
29:05
Natalie Zett: And my mother would say that too, if she were alive.
29:07
Natalie Zett: She'd say Natalie, it's not just about us, you know, you have to take care of everybody.
29:12
Crista Cowan: And that's kind of where I was headed with that, so I'm glad that that's where that landed which is your Aunt Martha was this bridge for you to your family, but she's also become this bridge to you, to this group of people that she had this connection to.
29:27
Crista Cowan: And so, as you've started uncovering these stories, then from the Eastland you know, you mentioned some familiar surnames, obviously because it was a group of people who worked together.
29:36
Crista Cowan: I'm sure there were family members and you know a community of people.
29:41
Crista Cowan: So there's going to be a lot of connections in that community.
29:45
Crista Cowan: But is there a particular story or person so far that has just really impacted you?
29:55
Natalie Zett: One that I think they all have.
29:56
Natalie Zett: I mean, they're all my favorite children at this point, but there's one that there's quite a few that I didn't expect that I'd ever find.
30:03
Natalie Zett: They're not on anybody's radar.
30:04
Natalie Zett: That's the most chilling thing of this.
30:06
Crista Cowan: They were nowhere, was there no list of total casualties.
30:11
Natalie Zett: There was Okay, chicago, I'm sorry, cook County Coroners.
30:15
Natalie Zett: There's a couple lists, but here's the thing Numbers have been thrown around.
30:20
Natalie Zett: You know all this time, you know there's certain numbers that are repeated.
30:25
Natalie Zett: Where is the list that is not just source-cited but it would need to be peer-reviewed?
30:31
Natalie Zett: I've never seen one.
30:32
Natalie Zett: I've heard numbers.
30:33
Natalie Zett: People lead off with numbers.
30:35
Natalie Zett: That makes me nervous sometimes, because it's like you know what.
30:37
Natalie Zett: You become dead to the effect when you just hear the sensational.
30:43
Natalie Zett: The stories that are told, that are repeated are.
30:45
Natalie Zett: They're dramatic I mean, entire families were lost and things like that but after a while you don't hear it anymore.
30:52
Natalie Zett: What about the Greek immigrant fellow that came?
30:55
Natalie Zett: What about the little boxer that I profiled last week in the website I mean my website as well as my podcast?
31:01
Natalie Zett: He was only 19.
31:02
Natalie Zett: He was an amateur boxer.
31:03
Natalie Zett: What about him?
31:04
Natalie Zett: What about these other people?
31:05
Natalie Zett: So they're all important to me, I think, when I do them, but there's no one that stands out.
31:12
Natalie Zett: There were.
31:13
Natalie Zett: What was so startling, though, krista, were the number of people who wrote letters to the editor in these one-off papers, like real small papers.
31:21
Natalie Zett: In Chicago, new Jersey, was another place where they had a lot of people, I know, because Western Electric had a presence in New York and a lot of them ended up in Chicago better opportunities, right, kind of like my family.
31:33
Natalie Zett: It's like no, not so much, but they're all important at the time and the way I treat them is the way I was treated when I was first learning how to do genealogy.
31:41
Natalie Zett: I took a lot of classes with Sunny and Lisa Louise and they treated my family like they were their family and that's what I do.
31:49
Natalie Zett: And so I think there's no, some of them are just striking, but the documentation, I would say it's very documentation, uneven, and I'm trying to be diplomatic here because I do get a little like oh, but there was one.
32:02
Natalie Zett: Okay, let me tell you one.
32:03
Natalie Zett: This is unbelievable, I think, about this guy.
32:06
Natalie Zett: This guy's doing penance in the afterlife.
32:07
Natalie Zett: He was a person who was robbing corpses down at the dock.
32:14
Natalie Zett: He was arrested and then he went on to make a story up about himself, about how he rescued all these people on the Eastland and he would go on the Speaker's Circuit and on Vaudeville and he was basically.
32:26
Natalie Zett: I mean, there were newspaper articles saying this guy's a fraud.
32:29
Natalie Zett: The Carnegie, whatever, I can't think.
32:31
Natalie Zett: Commission, whatever they were.
32:33
Natalie Zett: They had a heroes commission thing.
32:35
Natalie Zett: They said we don't know this guy and people don't do this sort of thing.
32:39
Natalie Zett: So he was going on and he went on and on forever and he was always where there were disasters and he was always saving people.
32:46
Natalie Zett: And they still certain places still tout this guy as a hero.
32:51
Natalie Zett: And I thought, oh, listen, buddy boy, we're going to talk about you.
32:53
Natalie Zett: So I devoted a whole episode to this guy and all I did was read the newspapers and then he died.
33:00
Natalie Zett: He was actually like a perfume salesman or like a ladies lingerie salesman or something.
33:05
Natalie Zett: He died this is karma in the stardust hotel gift shop in las vegas and I thought, see, but what I did was I thought listen, you, you are going, we're going to tell your story and we're you're going to do you're an example of what's happened to this.
33:22
Natalie Zett: The Eastland.
33:23
Natalie Zett: There's been a lot of, if not outright, con artists, people that are sloppy in their work about this, and I think that's why it's suffered so much, not because of the population, not because of anything else, but because the story has been gatekeepered, if you want to call it that.
33:38
Crista Cowan: It's a new, it's not even a word, but you know what I mean.
33:40
Natalie Zett: Yeah, absolutely, and I get really animated about that and it's just, oh.
33:48
Natalie Zett: So I think part of Martha's involvement was like oh no, you can't stop here, because this is not right.
33:51
Natalie Zett: And so I get a little Nellie Bly, joan of Arc on that.
33:54
Natalie Zett: But I thought, okay, take that, funnel it into telling their stories.
33:59
Natalie Zett: And I was working with a woman, a PhD student, and she also shared some stories with me that are even more disturbing.
34:05
Natalie Zett: And she said, natalie, you're on your own with this.
34:07
Natalie Zett: I said, no, I'm not.
34:08
Natalie Zett: I've got about 800, some that help me each week.
34:11
Natalie Zett: All I have to do is tell their story.
34:14
Natalie Zett: And now people want my manuscripts, I mean want the work that I've done, and they will keep it and they will take care of it and it will be there for people.
34:23
Natalie Zett: It's no longer lost stories or whatever.
34:26
Natalie Zett: And I thought, yeah, so Arthur Loeb, he's the guy, the con artist he's, he's done a lot of my work for me, because it's like, ok, he was long ago, but these types of people exist.
34:36
Natalie Zett: And what I didn't realize is there were so many of them, but I couldn't believe what I was reading it and what.
34:42
Crista Cowan: I didn't realize is there were so many of them, but I couldn't believe what.
34:44
Crista Cowan: I was reading.
34:44
Crista Cowan: It's just so unbelievable.
34:45
Crista Cowan: So he was the most memorable one because he was the worst.
34:47
Natalie Zett: Yeah, sounds like it.
34:47
Natalie Zett: He wasn't the only one.
34:48
Natalie Zett: Glad you asked, krista, I am, absolutely I am.
34:52
Crista Cowan: So you know Martha led you to your family history.
34:55
Crista Cowan: She led you to this disaster.
34:56
Crista Cowan: Now you've got all of these other people whose stories you're telling and I love that you're doing that.
35:05
Crista Cowan: You've got, you know, endless stories that you can tell.
35:06
Crista Cowan: As you're sharing those stories out into the world, are they connecting with descendants or family members of those other passengers?
35:13
Crista Cowan: You connected to the Eastland because of your familial connection.
35:17
Crista Cowan: I guess what I'm asking is is it trickling back out to the descendants and family members of the others whose stories you're telling.
35:24
Natalie Zett: It is.
35:24
Natalie Zett: There was one guy who was a descendant of the Cook County coroner, pete Hoffman, who reached out.
35:30
Natalie Zett: He goes hey, thank you for being kind to my was a great great grandfather.
35:35
Natalie Zett: Because Pete Hoffman was a controversial figure and I kind of liked him because he was just kind of you know, he was himself and they actually kind of immortalized him in the play and in the film front page and so he, one of his descendants, reached out, another descendant of one.
35:53
Natalie Zett: There was a young couple.
35:54
Natalie Zett: I called them the Rose and Jack of the Eastland.
36:01
Natalie Zett: They died together.
36:01
Natalie Zett: They were buried actually together even though they never married.
36:03
Natalie Zett: And one of his relatives from, I think, slovakia, reached out, and a lot of people from Slovakia because of my ancestry they reach out.
36:11
Natalie Zett: There's not a ton from there.
36:12
Natalie Zett: And there was a woman who wrote an article in the Chicago Genealogical Society's, one of their magazines, a few years ago.
36:20
Natalie Zett: I finally reached her, asked permission to tell the story and she said oh yeah, let me give you these photos.
36:26
Natalie Zett: And so she gave me photos of her.
36:29
Natalie Zett: I think it was her granddad who was a rescuer, but he never talked about it, but he got one of the stars that the coroner was handing out.
36:36
Natalie Zett: So not a ton.
36:37
Natalie Zett: But I don't expect that with podcasts, for the most part people don't reach out all the time For someone like you who already has, let's just say, quite a presence.
36:47
Natalie Zett: You are a presence and you've done so much good work in this.
36:50
Natalie Zett: Of course you would, but me.
36:52
Natalie Zett: It's like I'm just this person who does this.
36:55
Natalie Zett: But the beautiful thing of a podcast, unlike a book, unlike anything else, it can go anywhere.
37:00
Natalie Zett: I've got a huge fan base.
37:02
Natalie Zett: Let's see, I did a whole thing on Lithuanian the Lithuanians in Chicago and I got a rock group to give in Lithuania current rock group to give me some of their music.
37:11
Natalie Zett: So I opened with their music and they were happy to share it with me.
37:14
Natalie Zett: So, yeah, sure, and then I butchered Lithuanian language when I was trying to read it.
37:18
Natalie Zett: I said I apologize for the entire country of Lithuania for what I'm about to do, but they thought it was fun.
37:25
Natalie Zett: And so I got a lot of fans there and in Finland and a lot overseas, which surprises me Australia, canada and different places.
37:35
Natalie Zett: So again, I never expect much to happen.
37:37
Natalie Zett: I just expect that I will do a good job and I expect that I will honor these people.
37:43
Natalie Zett: If anybody cares, cares, great, and really, when it comes to people policing, I'm not really good at it anyway in a given moment.
37:49
Natalie Zett: So I just want to do what's right and I think, until somebody else comes along, I'm probably the best one to do it, because I have the.
37:56
Natalie Zett: It's a drive.
37:58
Natalie Zett: I mean, you wouldn't do this on your own unless you were.
38:00
Natalie Zett: But this is just like.
38:02
Natalie Zett: This is so wrong.
38:04
Natalie Zett: And again, I do have a thing about justice.
38:07
Natalie Zett: Some of my early articles were, let's just say, taking on things that were happening in other milieus and I thought, oh, I'm going to end this, but I've mellowed out a little bit, but not that much, and I just thought, no, this will be righted, the ship will be righted, the stories will be told.
38:30
Natalie Zett: That's why I like the title of your podcast too.
38:31
Natalie Zett: It's like, yes, and I believe in the power of the story, krista, to write anything, and I also let the dead speak.
38:33
Natalie Zett: I don't editorialize very much, I'll just say here's the article, draw your own conclusions.
38:35
Natalie Zett: This is how they spoke in 1915.
38:38
Natalie Zett: And I pulled out all the newspapers from that time too.
38:40
Natalie Zett: There was a trade journal of newspapers.
38:41
Natalie Zett: They had about 10, 15 newspapers that gave their accounts of all these people and what they did, how they got the story, how they told the story, how they tried to scoop each other.
38:50
Natalie Zett: It's crazy and it's just that kind of thing.
38:53
Natalie Zett: But, and like I said, last week I did a whole thing on amateur boxing and found out that there were women boxers in 1915 too.
38:59
Natalie Zett: So I bring the greater history of 1915 in the progressive era that was coming in the labor strifes.
39:07
Natalie Zett: There was a lot of stuff going on there that's kind of similar to what happens later on in history.
39:13
Natalie Zett: So when you know what's happened before, you can put your own time and context.
39:17
Natalie Zett: So long answer to your very short question.
39:20
Natalie Zett: That's kind of what's happened.
39:22
Natalie Zett: That's how it's evolved.
39:23
Crista Cowan: Yeah, well, it sounds like it's been a beautiful evolution from your, you know, days in grade school to your manuscript, from Aunt Pearl to the presence that is Aunt Martha and these stories that you are compelled to tell.
39:38
Crista Cowan: But I think you are compelled to tell because you are the person to tell them, and thank you so much for the time to get to know you a little bit and see a peek into your world and the world of the Eastland.
39:51
Crista Cowan: Before I let you go, I would just love to know you know you're only really a few years into telling these stories what is your hope for the future?
40:00
Natalie Zett: To keep going.
40:01
Natalie Zett: I mean you get better too as you go along.
40:03
Natalie Zett: I mean I look at this into my earlier podcast and it's like, oh well, but you know what, don't worry about perfection if anybody wants to start something like this.
40:10
Natalie Zett: And when I taught writing, I would say, look, that's constant course correction.
40:15
Natalie Zett: I taught writing at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and I think just to get better and to get more in tune and to and I think, just to get better and to get more in tune and to just and listen, to always listen.
40:26
Natalie Zett: It's like who wants to be profiled this week?
40:29
Natalie Zett: Oh, okay, here you go.
40:30
Natalie Zett: Let's go to this weird publication oh, look at that.
40:32
Natalie Zett: And to be and not ever put a barrier up for myself Don't be a gatekeeper and I'm very generous and I always like to instruct people how I get this information.
40:47
Natalie Zett: The Eastlands suffered from kind of lack of transparency.
40:48
Natalie Zett: It's like this is how I'm getting this.
40:49
Natalie Zett: You can do it too if you want.
40:50
Natalie Zett: And so there's no, there is magic, but that's not the magic part.
40:52
Natalie Zett: The magic part is the listening, I think, to the departed souls.
40:56
Natalie Zett: So I just hope to keep on as long as I can.
41:00
Natalie Zett: There's a lot of people, krista, more than I thought, and thank you for giving me this opportunity.
41:05
Natalie Zett: It is an honor to meet you after all.
41:07
Natalie Zett: This time it's like I'm talking to you.
41:09
Natalie Zett: I mean deep respect for all you've done for the genealogical community and people at the University of Minnesota know you too, by the way oh, wow.
41:19
Crista Cowan: You are beyond genealogy.
41:21
Natalie Zett: Your borders, too, expand Well.
41:23
Natalie Zett: Stories are important Well stories are important.
41:25
Crista Cowan: People's stories are important.
41:26
Crista Cowan: You know, I think maybe my heart about that, and so thank you for letting me hear a little bit about your heart for that, because I think together we will make sure that the stories that need to be told will be told, and we can then model that for so many others to go out and find the stories that they are the ones to tell.
41:44
Crista Cowan: Thank you, thank you Krista.