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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.

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