Monday, June 1, 2009

Last Titanic Survivor Dies

From Yahoo News:
Millvina Dean
, the last remaining survivor of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, died in a care home in England on Sunday, media reports said. She was 97. Elizabeth Gladys Dean, known to friends as Millvina, was only nine weeks old when the liner hit an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean on the night of April 14, 1912, and sank killing 1,500 people.
She survived after being bundled up in a sack and carried to safety. Her mother Georgette Eva and brother Bertram also made it, but her father, Bertram Frank, was among those who died.

Dean died in a private nursing home near Ashurst in the southern English county of Hampshire, according to the BBC and Britain's domestic Press Association news agency. Staff there refused to comment late Sunday.

Dean's family had boarded the Titanic at
Southampton, heading for a new life in Kansas where her father hoped to open a tobacconist shop.
Born on February 12, 1912, Dean was the youngest passenger on board. At the time,
RMS Titanic was the most luxurious, most technically advanced and largest passenger liner in the world.
She was dubbed "unsinkable", but it took just two hours and 40 minutes for her to disappear into the icy waters of the Atlantic after striking an iceberg at 11:40 pm on April 14.

Dean was taken back to Southampton with her family after the disaster and did not find out that she had been on board until she was eight years old and her mother was planning to remarry.

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