1Frank Goldsmith, Jr.
Frank Goldsmith, Jr., a Titanic survivor who later lived near Navin Field (Tiger Stadium) in Detroit, never took his children to baseball games because the roar of the crowd reminded him of the screams of people dying in the freezing water.
2. The second officer of the Titanic, Charles Lightoller, swam from the sinking ship to a capsized raft and lived. Later in life, he sailed his civilian boat to Dunkirk and helped get over 130 people out of the area.
3. Katherine Gilnagh was a Titanic survivor who was 16 when the ship sank. She didn't realize the seriousness of the ship's situation until she reached New York. She thought that disembarking in lifeboats and being picked up by another ship were all part of the journey.
4. Berthe Mayne was a Belgian singer who claimed to her family that she survived the Titanic's sinking by traveling first class as the mistress of a young Canadian millionaire. No one believed her until after her death, when her belongings and correspondence corroborated the story.
5. There's a picture of the iceberg that sank the Titanic, taken by the chief steward of the ocean liner Prinz Adalbert on the morning of April 15, 1912. He left a note on the photo saying he saw "plainly visible" red paint on the iceberg that appeared to have been left by the scraping of a vessel.
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6Rhoda Abbott
Rhoda Abbott was the only woman to survive being in the freezing water after the ship submerged. This 39-year-old divorcee was traveling in 3rd class with her teenage sons, and when it was her turn to enter the lifeboat, she realized that her sons would be denied a spot and, stepping back, refused a place in the lifeboat. She went down with the ship and was rescued, but her sons were lost.
7. Almost a month after the Titanic sank, a lifeboat from it containing three decomposed bodies was found 200 miles away.
8. The richest man that drowned on the Titanic, John Jacob Astor IV, left his wife a five-million-dollar fund, the use of his mansion in New York, one of his limos, and five of his prize horses on the condition she wouldn't remarry. She remarried after his death.
9. Loraine Allison was the only child from first class to die on the Titanic. She had remained with her parents on the ship looking for her baby brother, who, unknown to them, had already safely left in a lifeboat with his nanny.
10. One of the two co-owners and founders of Macy's died on the Titanic, along with his wife, because he refused to board rescue ships before women and children were helped. His wife chose to stay behind because she did not want to abandon her husband, so they both died aboard the Titanic.
11Fate of Engineers on Titanic
Not a single engineer made it off the Titanic; they stayed and kept the power on so others could escape.
12. When the Titanic went down, its shipping company stopped paying the crew but charged families the freight costs of shipping the bodies back. Most couldn't afford it, which is why there are so many memorials rather than graves for the more than 500 crewmen from Southampton who died aboard the ship.
13. A rescue ship at the Titanic's sinking retrieved a dead infant from the sea who could not be identified. The ship's sailors paid for a graveside monument dedicated to the Unknown Child. In 2007, DNA testing showed the child to be from an English family of six, the Goodwins, who all drowned.
14. Ships sent to retrieve the dead bodies of the victims of the Titanic disaster found so many bodies that they ran out of embalming supplies. They decided to only bring back the bodies of first-class passengers because "wealthy men needed to be identified visually to settle disputes over large estates."
15. Titanic crewman Herbert Pitman made an attempt to row his lifeboat over to rescue people in the water but was overruled by the other occupants of the boat, who were worried about people swarming them and duly complied. Pitman said that this haunted him throughout his life.
16William Murdoch
William Murdoch was a crew member on the Titanic. In the movie, he shot a passenger and then killed himself, but in real life, he was last seen trying to fill as many lifeboats as possible and bravely went down with the ship.
17. Thomas Andrews, the designer of the Titanic, was on board when it sank. His original design included features such as a double hull, more water-tight compartments, and twice as many lifeboats, but these ideas were overruled. He spent his last moments trying to evacuate passengers, and his body was never recovered.
18. Benjamin Guggenheim, heir to mining magnate Meyer Guggenheim, dressed in his finest suit, had a glass of brandy and smoked a cigar as the Titanic sank. "Tell [my wife] I played the game out straight to the end." "No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward."
19. Jeremiah Burke was an Irish Titanic passenger who sent a good-bye message in a bottle during the sinking. It subsequently washed up a year later near his home, where his handwriting was recognized by his mother.
20. A woman refused to board a lifeboat when the Titanic was sinking because she refused to be parted from her dog. Several days later, passengers on the SS Bremen passing by the wreckage in the water saw the body of a woman tightly holding a large, shaggy dog in her arms.
21Father Byles
Father Byles, a priest on the Titanic, refused to board a lifeboat twice and instead stayed behind to hear confessions and give absolution to the people left on the ship.
22. There were 12 dogs on the Titanic; 3 survived, mostly because they were tiny. There was also supposed to be one cat with young kittens on board the ship to control the rat population, but she was seen disembarking in Southampton, retrieving one kitten at a time.
23. As the Titanic sank, "someone decided to free the dogs from their kennels, leading to the surreal sight of a pack of excited dogs racing up and down the slanting deck."
24. Some of the first lifeboats to leave the Titanic were only half full because many people chose to stay on the warm ship, thinking that other ships would come and save them.
25. The Titanic carried over 3000 mail sacks on its maiden voyage. When it began to flood, the five postal clerks on board tried to save as much mail as they could by hauling the sacks on deck. All five of the postal clerks died in the sinking.
