Latest / Stories That Live In Us / Missouri: Disaster in the Heart of America (with Kim Harrison) | Episode 95

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Missouri: Disaster in the Heart of America (with Kim Harrison) | Episode 95 · Stories That Live In Us

0:00
Kim Harrison: Genealogy opens the door to learning about history that's not written in our books.
0:05
Kim Harrison: You know, it's it wasn't until I started doing genealogy that I got a rude awakening about a lot of historical facts.
0:14
Crista Cowan: Stories That Live in Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future.
0:22
Crista Cowan: I'm Krista Cowan, known online as the Barefoot Genealogist.
0:26
Crista Cowan: Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America.
0:37
Crista Cowan: Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us.
0:46
Crista Cowan: So join me for season two as we discover from sea to shining sea the stories that live in us.
0:52
Crista Cowan: The state of Missouri has long been called the Gateway to the West.
0:58
Crista Cowan: It's a title that carries the weight of thousands of families moving toward an unknown future.
1:03
Crista Cowan: But that gateway was built on the banks of the Mississippi River, which functions as the spine of our nation.
1:10
Crista Cowan: In the mid-1800s, Missouri was the command center for this watery highway, a place where news and commerce and people converged from every corner of what was at the time a divided country.
1:22
Crista Cowan: But history is a fragile thing.
1:23
Crista Cowan: When stories happen on the river, they're often at the risk of being swallowed by the current.
1:28
Crista Cowan: Today, we are looking at Missouri's deep connection to the Mississippi River through a story of homecomings and the thin line between survival and silence.
1:39
Crista Cowan: It's a journey that began on the bustling docks of St.
1:42
Crista Cowan: Louis and led to a moment that changed thousands of families forever.
1:47
Crista Cowan: A moment that for a long time was nearly lost in an archive.
1:51
Crista Cowan: Our guest today is Kim Harrison, and she understands more than most that if we don't actively protect our history, it disappears.
1:59
Crista Cowan: Kim has been dedicated to a single powerful idea that one person can make a difference in what we remember.
2:07
Crista Cowan: So she's going to share her personal quest to track down a family manuscript and how that journey led her to rescue a set of crumbling hand-penciled records that were once deemed too fragile for the public to see.
2:19
Crista Cowan: It's a conversation about the Gateway State, the power of the river, and the tireless work of making sure the voices of the past aren't washed away.
2:28
Crista Cowan: Enjoy my conversation with Kim Harrison.
2:32
Crista Cowan: Well, Kim, I'm so excited to talk to you.
2:35
Crista Cowan: You uh have a very long and illustrious career in um library science and library activities.
2:45
Crista Cowan: And I would love to learn a little bit more about how you got into that because I don't think I've ever heard that story.
2:51
Kim Harrison: I my professional career, I started out in insurance, which to me was okay, but very boring.
2:58
Kim Harrison: And so I happened to call Gale, uh, which is a big publishing house uh out of Detroit, trying to get my genealogy group to come and tour the facility in that because they were the publisher of Philby's uh books, and they wouldn't let me offline until I submitted an application.
3:24
Kim Harrison: So when I went, then it slowly progressed.
3:28
Kim Harrison: Uh in the sales department, they realized wait a minute, she speaks genealogy, and that was very similar to the first year Ancestry came to Gale.
3:38
Kim Harrison: So for years, it seemed like I followed the Ancestry contract uh from Gale.
3:45
Kim Harrison: Then when they switched over to ProQuest, my first day was there when Ancestry came and announced, guess what?
3:53
Kim Harrison: Now ProQuest is selling and that, but in tweet, in between Gale and ProQuest, I did a year stint with otherdays.com, which was out of Ireland, and that selling historical documents to libraries in the United States, Canada, and South America.
4:11
Kim Harrison: But then I went to ProQuest, and from there I left sales to become product manager.
4:18
Kim Harrison: When I left ProQuest, I went to Newsbank.
4:21
Kim Harrison: And then from there I got tired of always being on the road for them.
4:26
Kim Harrison: I came to Ancestry.
4:28
Kim Harrison: And that is my short synopsis of my working career.
4:32
Kim Harrison: I love that.
4:34
Kim Harrison: But the best thing about it was the people I crossed paths with.
4:40
Kim Harrison: Some of the people, the big names that people don't realize we really are standing on their shoulders, like Ruth Carr from the New York Public Library, for example.
4:50
Kim Harrison: Um, Mark Lowe, you know, I can just go on and on.
4:55
Kim Harrison: Uh, but then working also within the American Library Association, with Librarian State, both in the for NGS, FGS, and the American Library Association, bringing the library community and the genealogy community closer together.
5:13
Crista Cowan: I love that.
5:13
Crista Cowan: So your interest in genealogy predated your intro your involvement in the library community?
5:20
Kim Harrison: Oh, yes, very much so.
5:22
Kim Harrison: Um, back in the 70s, we were gearing up for the bicentennial, and my mother and my father, my dad was transferred, he worked for Kodak back to New York, and they had the nerve to abandon me with my in-laws.
5:40
Kim Harrison: And so, what do we do?
5:43
Kim Harrison: Mother decided we should talk about the family.
5:46
Kim Harrison: In other words, do research, not gossip about them.
5:49
Kim Harrison: And kind of the same thing sometimes.
5:52
Kim Harrison: It's a fine line, isn't it?
5:55
Kim Harrison: And so after a year, she kind of left me on my own.
5:58
Kim Harrison: She said I had to do the boring stuff going to libraries, which I loved.
6:03
Kim Harrison: And uh she went on her merry way to do whatever she was doing.
6:08
Kim Harrison: And I've just continued the passion for this and unearthing a lot of interesting things in my family.
6:18
Crista Cowan: I love that.
6:18
Crista Cowan: So your your interest in family history, spurred by your mom, it sounds like, led to your involvement in the library community, which ultimately then led to your employment in ancestry, which is how you and I know each other.
6:32
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
6:32
Crista Cowan: As you think back over your career, is there something um like really that you're really proud of?
6:41
Kim Harrison: I would, well, there's a lot of things I'm proud of.
6:44
Kim Harrison: My activities on preservation.
6:47
Kim Harrison: Um no one told me as a young girl starting out.
6:51
Kim Harrison: I really took my civics class to heart where it says one person can make a difference.
6:57
Kim Harrison: And two things I'm very proud of doing was uh preserving the railroad pension application files that are now at NARA in Atlanta.
7:07
Kim Harrison: And then that because of that, that led me to the preservation of the Sultana investigation records that are now on Fold Three.
7:17
Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
7:18
Crista Cowan: So um, as you think about the Sultana and those records that are now available on Fold Three, before we dive into the details of those records, could you just share the story of the Sultana and what happened um at the end of the after the end of the Civil War?
7:36
Kim Harrison: Yes.
7:36
Kim Harrison: It the Sultana today still remains the worst maritime disaster in the United States.
7:43
Kim Harrison: It happened at the close of the Civil War.
7:46
Kim Harrison: So when they were going down for the first time, the ship had been given back to the original owners because, like all steamships, they were pressed into service.
7:57
Kim Harrison: And so unfortunately, they carried the sad news going down of Lincoln's assassination.
8:02
Kim Harrison: And that then coming up, what they did is they picked up uh POWs returning from only three prisons Andersonville, Castle Morgan, and the Meridian prison, which were all on the same railroad line, and that so these people were literally walking skeletons that were put on the steamship to go north, and you have to back up.
8:30
Kim Harrison: And this is where you go down those rabbit holes.
8:33
Kim Harrison: You gotta appreciate the history of the Mississippi River.
8:37
Kim Harrison: Yeah, we are all used to thinking of it.
8:41
Kim Harrison: Oh, it's that blue line on that big map that we see in schools.
8:44
Kim Harrison: You don't realize that it's littered with a lot of islands in the bends and curves and sandbars.
8:52
Kim Harrison: And when they went up, it was during flood season.
8:57
Crista Cowan: So so let's just set the scene here just a little bit.
9:00
Crista Cowan: Okay, so when you say down, you mean downriver.
9:03
Crista Cowan: And when you say up, you mean up river.
9:05
Crista Cowan: And so where did it start originally?
9:08
Kim Harrison: Well, going down, it started in St.
9:10
Kim Harrison: Louis.
9:11
Crista Cowan: Okay.
9:12
Kim Harrison: And it went all the way down.
9:14
Crista Cowan: Who was on board at the time?
9:16
Kim Harrison: Uh just normal hanging passengers.
9:20
Crista Cowan: Okay.
9:20
Crista Cowan: So so the Mississippi River is like the major highway of the country at the time.
9:25
Kim Harrison: Yes.
9:26
Kim Harrison: So they were going down, trying to uh pick up cargo, you know, to uh after the war to New Orleans to uh make money in that.
9:39
Kim Harrison: Uh the captain also owned part of the steamship in that.
9:44
Kim Harrison: So that was another rabbit hole going down the five owners of the steamship.
9:49
Kim Harrison: And um anyways, they went down where the story really begins is when they uh went to New Orleans, they loaded, and then they came to Vicksburg.
10:02
Crista Cowan: That's where Vicksburg is in Mississippi, yes.
10:04
Crista Cowan: Yes, okay.
10:06
Kim Harrison: So it's you know, you gotta visualize the map, you gotta visualize all the little plantations on both sides of the river, and so there, that's where our issue started.
10:19
Kim Harrison: Well, I should back up.
10:21
Kim Harrison: It really started in New Orleans.
10:23
Kim Harrison: Going north, floodwaters really puts a toe on the steamship.
10:28
Kim Harrison: The boiler was damaged.
10:31
Kim Harrison: And so when they were pulling into Vicksburg, the engineer hopped off to go get a boiler maker to do repairs and that because they were fighting against because you're going upriver against the current of floodwaters.
10:44
Crista Cowan: Got it.
10:44
Crista Cowan: I'm with you now.
10:45
Crista Cowan: Okay.
10:46
Kim Harrison: Plus you're plus not only that, you're navigating, you know, all the you didn't know where the shoreline was.
10:53
Kim Harrison: You're navigating the sandbars, the islands, and that.
10:57
Kim Harrison: And to be a licensed captain or pilot, you also had to be able to get that license, draw all the islands and sandbars as part of your licensing.
11:07
Kim Harrison: Oh wow.
11:08
Kim Harrison: And that that's why, say, St.
11:10
Kim Harrison: Louis is the dividing point for the southern part of Miss Mississippi River versus the northern part of Mississippi River, are completely different in the waters.
11:22
Kim Harrison: And that.
11:23
Kim Harrison: So they got to Vicksburg.
11:25
Kim Harrison: This is where the military corruption started, and they overloaded a boat that was literally only licensed to carry about 300 people with crew.
11:37
Crista Cowan: And they overloaded it, they overloaded it because there was more money in that.
11:42
Kim Harrison: Yes.
11:42
Kim Harrison: You got ten dollars ahead for transporting someone home.
11:47
Kim Harrison: And so it was greed.
11:50
Kim Harrison: And that there were other steamship stock there, but the captain got off, made the deal, and they just kept loading people on the decks.
12:00
Kim Harrison: They had to brace the decks of the steamship.
12:04
Kim Harrison: And everyone kept saying, Well, what about these other steamships?
12:08
Kim Harrison: And they're like, No, no, no, because of the kickback scheme that was in place.
12:13
Kim Harrison: They actually had a medical doctor go on the steamship and pull people off of it, saying, No, they can't be on this steamship.
12:21
Kim Harrison: Also, already on board the steamship were normal pain passengers in that.
12:28
Kim Harrison: So we had a uh not a governor, a representative uh from Arkansas.
12:34
Kim Harrison: He was on his way to DC to get sworn in.
12:37
Kim Harrison: You have the Spikes family uh relocating from New Orleans just to get away from the war.
12:44
Kim Harrison: Uh, you have a banker from Chicago, for whatever reason, decided to do a honeymoon in New Orleans.
12:52
Kim Harrison: You know, all these little stories send you down a rabbit hole.
12:58
Kim Harrison: So then they overloaded the steamship, they thought they fixed the boiler, and it chugged up against floodwaters.
13:08
Kim Harrison: And then they got to uh Memphis, and of course, some of the passengers got off, and that all the uh soldiers pretty much remained on board.
13:20
Kim Harrison: They went across the river to Chicks and Hens to get their coal to get fuel, basically, and then start up, and they didn't get more than uh maybe three, five miles going crooked and the steamship blew up.
13:38
Kim Harrison: And so what you have in this tragedy is basically people that were living skeletons and that their thought was several things.
13:53
Kim Harrison: If you start to read their stories, was I can either drown, I could either burn to death.
14:01
Kim Harrison: One gentleman said, I was afraid to jump because of the alligator, because the crew had a pet alligator on board, and at one of the association meetings, the guy turned to him and said, Oh, you should have just swam because I killed the alligator to take his cage to float to safety downriver.
14:19
Kim Harrison: So that is the sad story of the Sultana.
14:26
Kim Harrison: Eventually, everybody did get home that survived.
14:31
Kim Harrison: It's just so sad because I need to step back and tell you if you don't know this, when you are captured, your unit is captured, you remain with that unit.
14:43
Kim Harrison: So it is very common that you have brothers and cousins serving next to each other.
14:50
Kim Harrison: And this is one of the things, as I'm trying to track down my ancestor, I realized he was right there in Andersonville with his cousins and his best friend, and they were also on this ship.
15:03
Kim Harrison: Luckily, they all survived.
15:08
Crista Cowan: So these men, they have survived the Civil War, they have survived the horrors of Andersonville, which we could have a whole conversation about in and of itself, as a as POWs uh to the Confederacy.
15:21
Crista Cowan: Now the war is over, they're heading home.
15:25
Crista Cowan: I have to imagine, like, the the anticipation of getting home may have also lent itself a little bit to the eagerness to just get on the boat.
15:36
Kim Harrison: Oh, yes.
15:37
Kim Harrison: I mean, no one's going to raise their hand and question if the fact that this steamship looks overloaded.
15:44
Kim Harrison: I want to go home.
15:45
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
15:46
Kim Harrison: And there is the very famous picture of the Saltana taken in Helena, Arkansas, where they just stopped to take on fuel.
15:56
Kim Harrison: No one got off.
15:57
Kim Harrison: And because a photographer was for whatever reason wanted to take the picture, they were afraid the steamship would capsize because everyone went to one side to be in that photograph.
16:10
Kim Harrison: And it was a matter of days, and the saltano blew up.
16:15
Kim Harrison: So now do do we have an estimate of how many people were on board?
16:19
Kim Harrison: Like that is the big debate.
16:22
Kim Harrison: I from my notes, it's about 2,000, 2300.
16:27
Kim Harrison: But I've seen where authorities have gone as high as 5,000 because the records went down with the ship.
16:35
Kim Harrison: Right.
16:36
Crista Cowan: And was there like what was the capacity of the ship?
16:40
Kim Harrison: About 378, and that's paying passengers and crew.
16:44
Kim Harrison: Wow.
16:46
Crista Cowan: So they just crammed them on every available corner of that boat.
16:50
Crista Cowan: So we've got the weight fighting against them.
16:53
Crista Cowan: What was the what was the rescue effort like?
16:56
Crista Cowan: Like where did the help come from?
16:58
Crista Cowan: And how did all those people eventually make their way to their final destinations?
17:03
Kim Harrison: Well, as soon as the call was put out, they realized there was a disaster.
17:08
Kim Harrison: Every steamship in the area started picking people up out of the water.
17:12
Kim Harrison: Um you know, they would be floating, they would grab them up, save them.
17:18
Kim Harrison: Sometimes they were lucky and they got to shore.
17:22
Kim Harrison: Um, they found them usually in trees and that, but it was all hands on deck.
17:27
Kim Harrison: You know, that's just the way maritime was.
17:31
Kim Harrison: That if you saw a disaster happening, you were required to go and help.
17:37
Kim Harrison: And that so there was a lot of steamships that came within an hour of the explosion.
17:44
Kim Harrison: But the whole event lasted maybe two to three hours from the the explosion until it burned to the waterline.
17:54
Kim Harrison: And so it sounds like there's not uh at that point, not a coordinated effort.
17:59
Kim Harrison: When the steamship disaster happened, the people that owned plantations on the Arkansas side, they said, get into the boats, we're going to rescue these people.
18:10
Kim Harrison: It was no longer uh a Confederate Union issue.
18:14
Kim Harrison: It was life was at stake.
18:16
Kim Harrison: You know, it's just a lot of the people that were passed away, their bodies are in the National Cemetery there.
18:25
Kim Harrison: This is what's really sad.
18:27
Kim Harrison: They were first buried in another cemetery with some sort of a marking, so you knew who was in the grave.
18:34
Kim Harrison: But when they relocated them, they wrote the names on the coffins.
18:39
Kim Harrison: And they did this during the rain, and the rain wiped away all the chalk.
18:45
Kim Harrison: So they're literally in unmarked graves, just Sultana, you know, victim.
18:52
Crista Cowan: You have this first hand account from your grandmother's uncle, or secondhand account, if you count the fact that his wife wrote it down.
18:58
Crista Cowan: Um, like how many firsthand accounts are there?
19:01
Crista Cowan: Like, have you discovered some as you've been going down all the rabbit holes of all the people on the boat?
19:06
Kim Harrison: Oh, yes.
19:07
Kim Harrison: You'll find a lot of times it may be in their obituaries.
19:11
Kim Harrison: Okay.
19:11
Kim Harrison: Um, newspaper articles, especially if you're following uh the they always met for a conference, these associations, so they would always relive the days.
19:23
Kim Harrison: Chesterberry's book is probably the best one in that, and all it is is people talking about their experience.
19:32
Kim Harrison: Some are just one paragraph, others will go on for page by page.
19:37
Kim Harrison: Um, you know, but you will find it you will even find it in county histories in that of, you know, yes, I served in the Civil War, but these things happen.
19:49
Kim Harrison: Newspapers, you know, these were returning local heroes, would sometimes pick it up, usually later in life, not right real close to the event.
19:59
Kim Harrison: Um You get a lot of information from the local newspapers real close to the event.
20:06
Kim Harrison: Um, keep in mind it would be picked up on both sides of the Mississippi River, Union side, Confederate side.
20:14
Crista Cowan: People who have never been to the Mississippi River have no concept of the size of that river.
20:21
Crista Cowan: Like I still remember the first time I went to the Mississippi River, it was from Mark Twain days.
20:27
Crista Cowan: We were in Hannibal, Missouri.
20:29
Crista Cowan: And and and I just remember thinking the river, like, you know, I come from the West where we have big rivers, but they're usually more fast moving than they are wide.
20:40
Crista Cowan: This is just like the expanse of that river.
20:43
Crista Cowan: But then you think about spring runoff and the the the I've seen now since then, I've driven, you know, over the bridge at Memphis into Arkansas and seen the way those floodwaters can just spread so wide, so quickly.
20:59
Crista Cowan: Like it's just a really, really giant body of water.
21:04
Kim Harrison: But in flood water flood season, you don't know where the shorelines are.
21:09
Kim Harrison: So you had people hanging from trees, you know, getting caught up.
21:15
Kim Harrison: Also, what people don't realize is since the time of this disaster, the Mississippi River has moved three miles east.
21:24
Kim Harrison: So the the remains of the Sultana after it was salvaged um was in the middle of a soybean field in Arkansas.
21:35
Crista Cowan: Oh my goodness.
21:37
Kim Harrison: You know, so I wonder what happened to the gold that was on the ship, the safe, you know, all these things.
21:43
Kim Harrison: You know, you had that family from the Spikes family relocating with their wealth, and you just, well, what happened?
21:53
Kim Harrison: What happened to these little things?
21:56
Kim Harrison: And then you start reading the book by Chester Berry, who was the first one who went around and documented everyone's memory of the event.
22:07
Kim Harrison: Please don't read it before you go to bed.
22:09
Kim Harrison: It is a very sad read about these gentlemen surviving in that.
22:16
Kim Harrison: And not everyone submitted an article.
22:19
Kim Harrison: My ancestor never did, but fortunately, I I knew my grandmother, and she said when I started doing genealogy, could you please track down Adam Russell's unpublished manuscript?
22:36
Kim Harrison: I loaned it to the DAR, and when I left Michigan City to go to back to Duluth, Minnesota, I never got it back.
22:45
Kim Harrison: And so that's what really started my interest in the Sultana.
22:51
Kim Harrison: And then she said, Well, you know, we did have an ancestor on it.
22:55
Kim Harrison: It's his words.
22:56
Kim Harrison: And he really didn't talk too much about his experience with the war, but when he did, his wife grabbed those thoughts and put it down on paper.
23:08
Crista Cowan: So this is your, so this is your okay, your connection to the Sultana is your grandmother.
23:13
Crista Cowan: Which side, grandmother?
23:15
Crista Cowan: My mother's side.
23:16
Crista Cowan: Okay, so your maternal grandmother, and this is her grandfather?
23:20
Crista Cowan: No, it's her uh uncle.
23:22
Crista Cowan: Her uncle.
23:23
Crista Cowan: Okay.
23:23
Crista Cowan: Just wanted to make sure I was following along.
23:25
Crista Cowan: So you grew up knowing or had some knowledge at some point that you had a connection to the Sultana.
23:31
Crista Cowan: Is that what in is that what led you to research more about it, or was there some interest tangentially otherwise?
23:40
Kim Harrison: No, it's just the family connection.
23:42
Kim Harrison: Okay.
23:43
Kim Harrison: I being young and you know, I figure, oh sure, grandma, I'll track that down.
23:47
Kim Harrison: Not a problem.
23:48
Kim Harrison: Well, I finally did find it.
23:52
Kim Harrison: Unfortunately, grandma had passed in that I found it um about 15 years ago in the archives in Madison.
24:02
Kim Harrison: Yeah, my grandparents never lived in Wisconsin.
24:06
Kim Harrison: The woman that donated it never lived in Michigan City.
24:10
Kim Harrison: So I don't know how she got it.
24:12
Kim Harrison: But anyways, I did get a copy of it.
24:16
Kim Harrison: And you know, it's one of those things, grandma, I got it.
24:22
Crista Cowan: So your grandma's telling you that this manuscript exists from her uncle, and you knew it was a Civil War history, but did you know it was connected to the Sultana?
24:32
Crista Cowan: Did your grandmother know that story already?
24:34
Kim Harrison: Yes, she knew about the steamship.
24:36
Kim Harrison: Okay.
24:37
Kim Harrison: And I don't know if she knew Anderson though, she just said he was a prisoner of the war.
24:42
Kim Harrison: Yeah.
24:43
Kim Harrison: Was the phrase she used.
24:44
Kim Harrison: But she then said about the Sultana.
24:47
Kim Harrison: Okay.
24:49
Crista Cowan: So so it's so interesting.
24:51
Crista Cowan: Like, I don't remember hearing anything about the Sultana growing up, like in history class or studying the Civil War.
24:59
Crista Cowan: Did you know anything about it before you dove into this research head first?
25:04
Kim Harrison: Oh no.
25:04
Kim Harrison: Genealogy opens the door to learning about history that's not written in our books.
25:10
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
25:11
Kim Harrison: You know, it's it wasn't until I started doing genealogy that I got a rude awakening about a lot of historical facts.
25:19
Crista Cowan: Right.
25:19
Crista Cowan: We do have a account of survivors.
25:22
Crista Cowan: Yes.
25:23
Crista Cowan: And how many of those do we have?
25:25
Kim Harrison: I would say at least 2,000 maybe survived.
25:30
Kim Harrison: That's everybody that's crew, that's pain passengers, that is POWs, and that's based on using the fact that that ship totally was uh carrying three to four thousand people on it.
25:46
Crista Cowan: Just for like comparison, that's essentially more people that died on the Sultana than died on the Titanic.
25:53
Crista Cowan: Correct.
25:54
Crista Cowan: Correct.
25:54
Crista Cowan: And yet everybody knows the story of the Titanic.
25:57
Crista Cowan: That is true.
25:58
Crista Cowan: You know, this is the end of the war.
26:00
Crista Cowan: And and President Lincoln had just been shot.
26:04
Crista Cowan: Correct.
26:05
Crista Cowan: And so that is that maybe part of it that the the reason that this didn't get the attention or the news or the coverage at the time?
26:13
Kim Harrison: Well, the front page was dominated by the assassination.
26:16
Kim Harrison: Keep in mind, this was considered kind of the Western frontier.
26:20
Kim Harrison: So back east, where all the big newspapers were, they were covering like the big fire or in New York City or the riots or whatever.
26:31
Kim Harrison: So you would find this story about the Sultana either at the bottom of page one or maybe page two or page three.
26:38
Crista Cowan: Yeah, it's just interesting because you think about like when disasters occur today, or even you know, a hundred and some odd years ago when the Titanic sank.
26:46
Crista Cowan: Like that makes global news something that gets talked about for a century later.
26:53
Crista Cowan: So the fact that this is such a story that most people have never heard of before, I is just interesting that you know the war is ending, these men are finally coming home, and the fact that so many of them die, like it's barely a footnote in history for most people.
27:10
Crista Cowan: It's super sad.
27:11
Crista Cowan: Yes.
27:12
Crista Cowan: That's true.
27:13
Crista Cowan: But thankful to you, the these stories not only have been preserved, but the records themselves have been preserved.
27:21
Crista Cowan: Tell me a little bit about um why you felt it would like it was so important to preserve the investigation records of the sultana.
27:31
Crista Cowan: Maybe even a little bit about like how you found them, where you found them, and then what that whole process was.
27:38
Kim Harrison: Well, being a genealogist, I'm nosy and I want access to everything.
27:44
Kim Harrison: I felt I was entitled to it.
27:47
Kim Harrison: Um, that's before I realized, you know, got some wisdom.
27:51
Kim Harrison: Um so, anyways, I came across this record set.
27:55
Kim Harrison: And that Nara always said, Well, it's in pencil, it's not in very good condition.
28:00
Kim Harrison: You kind of have to come and see it.
28:02
Kim Harrison: And were they held in St.
28:04
Kim Harrison: Louis?
28:05
Kim Harrison: No, they were held in DC.
28:08
Crista Cowan: Okay.
28:08
Kim Harrison: And I'm like, you know, I'm a young mother, you know, I don't have that money.
28:13
Kim Harrison: And um, so I'm like, and it's almost like they held the story, the Sultana, as something only scholars could look at.
28:23
Kim Harrison: And so as I realized this record group, because a lot of it was written in pencil, was at risk, I asked them, has anyone tried to save them?
28:35
Kim Harrison: And they said, Well, no, not really, but you're not scholarly enough to come and look at it.
28:42
Kim Harrison: And I'm kind of like, Well, I won't use uh any uh swear words here, but so I'm thinking and I'm thinking, and at the same time, I was lobbying for the railroad pension files in that, and that's a huge, huge collection, and that bigger than the Civil War pension collection.
29:07
Kim Harrison: So I'm thinking, okay, how am I going to do this?
29:11
Kim Harrison: So I approached uh Barbara Brown, who was part of the Abrams Foundation, which is based in Lansing, Michigan.
29:21
Kim Harrison: Now they never had given a grant outside of Lansing area.
29:26
Kim Harrison: And that, and it's always been pretty much, you know, health things, different things like that.
29:31
Kim Harrison: And I wanted to use that grant as a test case for if I had to write a grant for the railroad pension records.
29:41
Kim Harrison: So I went to Barbara and I said, What do you think my chances are if I wrote a nice letter with all the good words in it, begging for money to preserve the this investigation?
29:57
Kim Harrison: And Barbara was a genealogist in her own right.
30:01
Kim Harrison: And so she said, Well, go ahead and do it.
30:04
Kim Harrison: I got the price from Nara, sent it to Barbara with all my arguments.
30:09
Kim Harrison: They awarded it.
30:11
Kim Harrison: We went through uh FGS and and got it.
30:16
Kim Harrison: And the condition was that these things had to remain available for free.
30:22
Kim Harrison: So NARA has the preserved records.
30:25
Kim Harrison: And then as when I was working uh at Ancestry and that, and of course, they were big into the war of 1812, preserving and making things free, whether you were a paying customer or not.
30:37
Kim Harrison: I'm thinking, well, my records could be there for free.
30:41
Kim Harrison: It would reach a lot of people, and it would be on someone else's dime to digitize it.
30:48
Kim Harrison: And I kept thinking about it, and I went to one of my bosses at the time and I said, Can't we do this?
30:56
Kim Harrison: He said, Sure.
30:57
Kim Harrison: And that's how they got there, and so you can read the investigation and everything.
31:05
Kim Harrison: Um, but you know, they tried to list everybody in there.
31:09
Kim Harrison: So I found my my ancestors on those lists of survivors, and uh so that is the story.
31:19
Crista Cowan: So you just did it.
31:20
Crista Cowan: So yeah, so those records are now available on fold3.com for free uh because of your efforts and to save them.
31:29
Crista Cowan: And that, I mean, you started that you mentioned when you were a young mom.
31:32
Crista Cowan: So how many years from the time you first uncovered these records at NARA to the time you got them published on Fold 3?
31:41
Kim Harrison: I got them, I believe, preserved or published finally in the 80s or 90s.
31:50
Kim Harrison: I mean, they started doing it, but it wasn't until 2013, 2012 that I got got them on uh full three.
32:04
Kim Harrison: But meanwhile, part of the grant was that there would be so many copies given to key libraries.
32:11
Kim Harrison: Um, that's how the Library of Michigan got it.
32:14
Kim Harrison: The uh Tennessee State Archives has a copy.
32:18
Kim Harrison: Uh Allen County, Midcontinent.
32:21
Kim Harrison: I mean, there were several key libraries that were also included in that grant.
32:25
Kim Harrison: Who got copies of that besides NARA?
32:30
Crista Cowan: Well, um, as like the Mississippi River, such an important like highway for the country at the time.
32:38
Crista Cowan: And you've got these steamships going up and down that river.
32:41
Crista Cowan: But St.
32:42
Crista Cowan: Louis, in particular, as a city, was a really important part of that traffic.
32:48
Crista Cowan: And as you've been doing all of this research into this particular disaster, into Civil War history, into the history that, you know, of of even Michigan and and places north of St.
33:00
Crista Cowan: Louis, how does St.
33:02
Crista Cowan: Louis play into all of this for you and as a genealogist?
33:06
Kim Harrison: Well, it is the hotbed of some of the best maritime records are housed there.
33:12
Kim Harrison: Um, but it is a commerce point.
33:16
Kim Harrison: So if you're studying any type, even if you're on the Ohio River, in that you are eventually going to go to St.
33:23
Kim Harrison: Louis in that not only because of it being a huge port, but it's also the great place for whether you're going to go downriver or upriver.
33:33
Kim Harrison: We forget that so many people came into the United States through New Orleans and on up, and then St.
33:40
Kim Harrison: Louis was their path.
33:42
Kim Harrison: Uh, it's also the path going up the river to um marble mines there in Minnesota.
33:50
Kim Harrison: Uh you know, you can't separate it.
33:52
Kim Harrison: And then, of course, the farming aspect.
33:54
Kim Harrison: So it's commerce.
33:56
Kim Harrison: It was a big moneymaker.
33:58
Kim Harrison: So St.
33:58
Kim Harrison: Louis kind of was the big city there, kind of anchoring in the middle of the country, if you will.
34:06
Crista Cowan: Yeah, and you just think about like my own ancestors.
34:09
Crista Cowan: Um, some of them came in through the port of New Orleans, switched from an ocean-going vessel to a steamship, went up the Mississippi.
34:17
Crista Cowan: Right.
34:18
Crista Cowan: They ended up in in Missouri and Illinois for some of them.
34:22
Crista Cowan: But then some of them, like you said, they used that as a jumping off point to get a railroad to, you know, or get a wagon train if they had come earlier than that.
34:30
Crista Cowan: Like that, St.
34:31
Crista Cowan: Louis becomes this hub of immigrant activity, but but ultimately it is the heart of the country, uh, especially during the Civil War, and was a division of a lot of, you know, a dividing line of a lot of things that were happening during that time.
34:48
Crista Cowan: But the river itself, as it flows through that part of the country, has stories to tell for sure.
34:56
Crista Cowan: And it sounds like with the Sultana, you have spent a lifetime essentially studying the stories that there are to discover there.
35:04
Crista Cowan: As you think about the Sultana disaster, like you have your own personal connection to it.
35:09
Crista Cowan: But is there a story of a person that you've learned in the middle of all of this that is stuck with you?
35:16
Kim Harrison: Yes.
35:17
Kim Harrison: One pain passenger, Ann Annis, and that, and her husband was a lieutenant, but he wasn't a POW.
35:27
Kim Harrison: He was recuperating.
35:30
Kim Harrison: So she had come from Wisconsin with a seven-year-old daughter, even though they in the thing they say it's a baby, to care for him, and he got well enough to travel back home to Wisconsin.
35:46
Kim Harrison: And unfortunately, she survived.
35:49
Kim Harrison: He passed away, and so did the daughter.
35:52
Kim Harrison: And of course, she was very furious when she got home.
35:55
Kim Harrison: Her two sons had since run off to join the Civil War.
35:58
Kim Harrison: What is interesting about Anne is this was her third marriage.
36:05
Kim Harrison: Her she was from Germany.
36:07
Kim Harrison: Her first two husbands were sea captains that died in their occupation, and that um their boats sank and whatever.
36:18
Kim Harrison: So she was a widow with a few kids, migrated to Wisconsin, and all three of her husbands, the water took them.
36:28
Kim Harrison: And it's just it's just mind-blowing.
36:31
Kim Harrison: It's time freaking I feel for her in that.
36:35
Kim Harrison: And the other person is the 17-year-old son of the Spikes family was the only survivor out of eight people, I believe, eight or six people of the Spikes family.
36:49
Kim Harrison: They all perished, but he didn't know that at the time, and he got to shore, but he didn't just sit around.
36:58
Kim Harrison: He went back out to help rescue other people.
37:01
Kim Harrison: And it wasn't until later he realized he lost his whole family.
37:05
Kim Harrison: But they did save his family Bible.
37:09
Kim Harrison: His family Bible was one of the ones that got washed up on one of the islands, and that so those are two stories that aren't connected to me that kind of just tugs at my heart.
37:22
Kim Harrison: Um, you know, the impact that it had on these people.
37:28
Crista Cowan: Yeah.
37:28
Crista Cowan: Well, well, it's a story that touches, you know, it's interesting because we're doing this America 250 series, and our focus for this episode is Missouri, because when I think of the state of Missouri, I think of the Mississippi River, because that's been my connection to the state of Missouri.
37:47
Crista Cowan: But because of the Mississippi River and its location and the traffic, like really it touches people from so many states and so many places.
37:58
Crista Cowan: And so this becomes not just this historic crossroads of the, you know, east and west and north and south and the you know the spread of people across America, but the river itself becomes a story of America as well.
38:15
Kim Harrison: It is, it really is.
38:18
Crista Cowan: Well, thank you so much, Kim, for sharing the story of the Sultana with us.
38:22
Crista Cowan: And thank you so much for the work you did to preserve those records.
38:25
Crista Cowan: I think that's such important work, and I love that that those records are now available for everybody.
38:31
Kim Harrison: Yeah.
38:31
Kim Harrison: Please read them.
38:32
Kim Harrison: They're worth the read.
38:34
Kim Harrison: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.