In this episode, I finish reading “Catastrophe on the Chicago River,” a Czech-language article by Josef Mach Sr. from 1916. The piece delivers a searing, firsthand account of the Eastland Disaster’s impact on Chicago’s Czech community: families shattered by the loss of multiple members, a grieving husband driven to despair after losing his wife, and three hundred funerals unfolding in just three days.
But then, an unexpected detail rises to the surface.
Near the end of the article, a name appears: Anton J. Cermak. Chief Bailiff. President of the Czech Assistance Committee. The man who would later become Chicago’s first and only foreign (Czech) born mayor—and who would die after the 1933 assassination attempt that also targeted Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Cermak didn’t just oversee a relief fund. According to a 1934 Czech publication, he rushed to the scene, worked without rest for days, and may have never fully recovered.
This was not a new discovery. The Eastland Memorial Society had already traced Cermak’s connection and shared it on their website. When the organization dissolved, that knowledge was left behind. It lingered, preserved yet hidden, waiting in the Internet Archive.
And this cycle repeats itself.
The research is out there. The documentation survives. But when groups dissolve, authors move on, and sites go dark, history sometimes slides back into the river—not because it was never found, but because research gets reduced to a highlight reel and bullet points.
As Elizabeth Shown Mills reminds us, genealogy requires reasonably exhaustive research. That standard doesn’t expire. It doesn’t end when a book gets published or when a historical organization closes its doors.
The Eastland story needs researchers who will keep digging, keep translating, keep connecting the dots, because the cycle of endlessly “rediscovering” what was already known is wearing thin.
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