1915 SS Eastland Disaster Film Footage Surfaces

Eastland-1914-Disaster-in-Chicago-River-250pw

The following excerpt is from the February 8, 2015 edition of the Chicago Tribune:

For years, Ted Wachholz had all the evidence he needed to believe that film footage of the 1915 SS Eastland disaster on the Chicago River existed, except maybe for the film itself.

The chief historian of a group dedicated to the capsizing that killed 844 people could cite newspaper clippings that refer to recording equipment and archived photos that show movie cameras on tripods.

That changed Saturday morning, when the founder of the Eastland Disaster Historical Society woke up to links on the group’s Facebook page to footage posted by a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

See the film footage itself.

Read the full article.

Thanks to my friend, Linda Petrasek, for the heads-up.

About Leland Meitzler

Leland K. Meitzler founded Heritage Quest in 1985, and has worked as Managing Editor of both Heritage Quest Magazine and The Genealogical Helper. He currently operates Family Roots Publishing Company (www.FamilyRootsPublishing.com), writes daily at GenealogyBlog.com, writes the weekly Genealogy Newsline, conducts the annual Salt Lake Christmas Tour to the Family History Library, and speaks nationally, having given over 2000 lectures since 1983.

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