It’s been more than 100 years since the Titanic sank on the night of April 14-15 1912, and the stories of its victims continue to haunt us. Here are some that are particularly heartbreaking…
1.
Frank John Goldsmith was 9 years old when he traveled on the Titanic with his family. He and his mother survived and moved into a home next to Navin Field in Detroit, where the cheers of the crowd during every baseball game provided a constant reminder of the screams of the drowning.
2.
Frank John Goldsmith’s family friend, Alfred Rush, had just turned 16 on the final day of the Titanic, April 14 — making him a “man” and entitling him to wear long pants for the first time. When women and children were being evacuated that night, Alfred Rush refused to get in a lifeboat, saying “I’m staying here with the men.” He did not survive.
3.
Archibald Gracie was a first-class passenger who was diabetic, and although he survived the sinking, he suffered complications from his injuries that led to his death just eight months later. He spent those last months obsessed with recounting and recording the events of the Titanic; he was so haunted that his last words were reportedly, “We must get them into the boats. We must get them all into the boats.”
4.
Rhoda Abbott was a third-class passenger traveling with her two sons, 16-year-old Rossmore and 13-year-old Eugene. When the three of them arrived at one of the remaining lifeboats, only a spot for Rhoda was available, but she didn’t want to leave her sons and stayed behind with them. When the ship sank, she was swept away from her sons and ended up being rescued, while both her boys died.
5.
Even though the policy for filling the lifeboats was “women and children first”, about half of the children onboard the Titanic died, most of whom were third-class passengers.
6.
Two-year-old Loraine Allison was one of the only first-class children to die; she and her mother, Bess, were on a lifeboat but re-boarded the ship after being told Loraine’s father, Hudson, was on a different lifeboat; it seems they never found him. Loraine’s baby brother, Trevor, survived after being taken on a lifeboat earlier by his nurse, Alice Cleaver; he was raised by relatives but died at the age of 18 from food poisoning.
7.
Six-year-old Douglas Spedden was one of the children who survived, but he died just three years later after being hit by a car. The photo below shows him playing with a spinning top on the ship’s deck during the journey.
8.
Around 1,200 of the approximately 1,500 people who died during the Titanic disaster were never found.
9.
The Mackay-Bennett was one of the ships chartered to retrieve bodies in the aftermath of the disaster, loaded with wood coffins and tons of ice. One of the crew described how they discovered a cluster of about 100 corpses on the surface of the ocean on the second day of their search: “We had to tell ourselves that they were dead, because for all the world they looked like a lot of swimmers asleep,” he said. “Some of the eyes were closed, but most of them were wide open, staring straight ahead.”
10.
Some bodies that were recovered by the Mackay-Bennett were buried at sea — mostly those of third-class passengers as well as crew members, with priority given to bringing the bodies of wealthy victims back to land, because their deaths “might give rise to such questions as large insurance and inheritance,” according to the Mackay-Bennett’s captain.
12.
One reason Sidney Goodwin’s body remained unidentified was that his entire family — father Frederick, mother Augusta, and siblings Lillian (16), Charles (14), William (11), Jessie (10), and Harold (9) — perished in the disaster. They had planned to sail on an earlier voyage on a different ship, but couldn’t because of a coal strike. The rest of the family’s bodies were seemingly never recovered.
13.
The Sage family was another family wiped out in the disaster. The father, John, had traveled to America the previous year and purchased land before returning to England to bring his family to their new home. Like the Goodwins, the coal strike forced the family to delay their originally planned journey and sail on the Titanic instead. John, his wife Annie, and all nine of their children, aged from 4 to 20, died. It was the single biggest recorded loss of life from one family. Only one body, that of 11-year-old William, was recovered.
14.
The small town of Addergoole in Ireland saw 14 of its 3,496 residents head to America aboard the Titanic. Only three of them survived. Those that died included Catherine Bourke, her husband John Burke, and his sister Mary Madden — the women were both offered spots on a lifeboat, but refused to leave John.
15.
Thousands of artifacts have been recovered from the Titanic wreckage, including perfume bottles that still contained scent, and the purse of third-class passenger Marian Meanwell, which contained her health inspection ticket that showed she was originally meant to sail on the Majestic, which had been removed from service, leading to her traveling and dying on the Titanic.
16.
There were 12 dogs aboard the Titanic, but only three survived, seemingly smuggled onto lifeboats. One passenger, Helen Margaret Bishop, described having to leave her dog to die in her cabin as she didn’t think he would be welcome on a lifeboat; she said the dog desperately tried to stop her from abandoning her by tugging at her clothes with her teeth.
17.
There were other animals aboard, including Jenny, the official ship cat, and the kittens she had recently given birth to, as well as several birds, and, of course, a lot of rats. None of them likely survived.
18.
The ship’s orchestra kept playing to try to help keep people calm as they moved onto lifeboats — and continued playing until the very last minute, going down with the ship.
19.
Many Titanic crew members also kept working as the ship sank, doing what they could to keep things running so that as many people as possible could evacuate. This included William Parr, an electrician who kept the ship’s lights on until just two minutes before the ship sank.
20.
Ida Straus was a first-class passenger who reportedly refused to get on a lifeboat without her husband, Isidor, saying, “as we have lived, so we will die, together.” Decades later, their great-great-granddaughter, Wendy Weil Rush, was widowed when her husband, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, died while piloting the Titan submersible in its doomed attempt to visit the Titanic wreckage.
21.
This is allegedly a photo of the iceberg that sank the Titanic, taken by a passenger on the rescue ship Carpathia on the morning of April 15, 1912.
Do you have a fact about the Titanic that still gives you chills? Share it in the comments or anonymous form below.
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