Send us a text

Memory can be loud and still leave people out.

This week, I’m pulling back the curtain on how, in the late 1990s, the Eastland Disaster story was rediscovered, shaped, reshaped, and carried onto the early Internet (courtesy of the Eastland Memorial Society). But when that original website vanished, some of its content — including family-written stories and volunteer research — resurfaced in later retellings without the names of the people who first contributed them.

In other words, the attribution was MIA.

And I’ll share how the record can be rebuilt using clear sources, solid attribution, and a commitment to course-correction whenever new evidence turns up — those moments where the archive gently reminds you, “There’s more to the story.”

The guideposts are stubbornly simple:

• Cite your sources
• Credit those who did the work
• Welcome contradiction.
• Keep the file open for new research — even if it means letting go of a cherished assumption (or two!).

In this episode, I spotlight the Eastland Memorial Society — the under-credited early web project that built timelines, tracked permissions, preserved photographs, saved media coverage, and offered essential context back when the internet was barely out of diapers. Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, those pages now act as a genuine research Rosetta Stone.

Resources:

• The Eastland Disaster (1999). Documentary featuring members of the Eastland Memorial Society and historian George Hilton. Digitized by the Internet Archive.
• Eastland Memorial Society, “News,” archived Oct. 20, 2000, via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
• Hilton, George Woodman. Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.

• Book website: https://www.flowerintheriver.com/
• LinkTree: @zettnatalie | Linktree
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-z-87092b15/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zettnatalie/
• YouTube: Flower in the River - A Family Tale Finally Told - YouTube
• Medium: Natalie Zett – Medium
• The opening/closing song is Twilight by 8opus
• Other music. Artlist

Send us a text

Sirens, floodwater, shattering glass, and a calm voice saying, “Just a moment, please.” We revisit the women who turned raw noise into order—telephone operators whose steady hands and quick minds kept cities connected and, in wartime, helped save lives on the front lines.

We start in Chicago with the Eastland disaster and widen the lens to the “Hello Girls,” the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit. These bilingual women carried commands across the trenches, cut confusion to seconds, and worked under fire in wooden barracks —yet they weren’t officially recognized as veterans until 1977 thanks to President Jimmy Carter. Along the way, we read from the 1920 Green Book magazine feature that captured the role’s grit and grace:

• a chief operator swept away in a New Mexico flood after clearing her crew,
• a Chicago operator who kept cool as glass rained down after a bombing, and
• Texas teams who reported to flooded exchanges in bathing suits because the calls couldn’t wait.

We also talk ethics and craft: The operator who ran the Peace Conference switchboard and never “listened in,” is a reminder that power over the line demands restraint. Inside smaller exchanges, chiefs balanced training, staffing, reports, and the daily diplomacy of customer tempers. And we honor one whose skill modernized boards during the 1893 World’s Fair and whose name graced a rest home for operators.

This is a story about communication as a social contract. Before automation, the network had a heartbeat, and it belonged to women who treated urgency with poise and turned chaos into connection. If the history of technology often centers machines, these voices remind us that trust is the first infrastructure.

Resources:

• The Green Book Magazine (Nov. 1920)
• Smithsonian audio: Telephone Operators
• A Switchboard Operator and a Nurse Walk Into a Shipwreck

• Book website: https://www.flowerintheriver.com/
• LinkTree: @zettnatalie | Linktree
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-z-87092b15/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zettnatalie/
• YouTube: Flower in the River - A Family Tale Finally Told - YouTube
• Medium: Natalie Zett – Medium
• The opening/closing song is Twilight by 8opus
• Other music. Artlist

Send us a text

What happens when the storyteller is gone—but the story keeps rewriting itself?

A single family biography can carry the weight of a neighborhood’s memory. We open the archives on a 20-year-old Western Electric employee who boarded the Eastland with her fiancé in 1915—and trace how her story, first written by a family member, nearly disappeared under paraphrase and missing attribution.

What begins as a personal account of loss becomes a blueprint for preserving authorship, provenance, and trust across the fragile web.

What began as a family story became a case study in restoring authorship and digital integrity.

We walk through the dynamic immigrant life of Cicero, the morning the Eastland rolled into the Chicago River, and the sibling who arrived just as the ship capsized.

Alongside those details, we share how we traced the original 1999 article, found the author’s later blog posts, and mapped the path of unattributed copies that flattened key context.

If you love genealogy, public history, or deep research, this episode offers a practical toolkit:

•Time-stamped archiving with the Wayback Machine and Archive.Today

•Side-by-side document comparison

•A clear-eyed approach to AI that favors verification over automation

We close by restoring the story—and the storyteller’s name—to its rightful place.

Recognizing the author isn’t optional—it’s about respecting ownership, upholding ethics, and protecting the record for those who follow.

Resources:

• Family History by Colleen (Colleen Ringel's blog)
• Chronicle Makers (Denyse Allen)
• Genealogy Gems (Lisa Louise Cooke)
• The Familly History AI Show (Make Thompson & Steve Little)
• Archive.today
• Internet Archive Wayback Machine
• View Gabriella Schlentz’s FamilySearch profile here.

• Book website: https://www.flowerintheriver.com/
• LinkTree: @zettnatalie | Linktree
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalie-z-87092b15/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zettnatalie/
• YouTube: Flower in the River - A Family Tale Finally Told - YouTube
• Medium: Natalie Zett – Medium
• The opening/closing song is Twilight by 8opus
• Other music. Artlist