Last Titanic Survivor Dies

Millvina Dean died peacefully in her sleep over the weekend at the age of 97.

Like most people, you are probably scratching your head trying to remember where you have heard this name.  Was she a movie star or a famous author?

Nope. She was a quiet, unassuming woman who never married and worked her life as a secretary in her native England.

But she will be most likely remembered as the last survivor of the Titanic’s tragic sinking back in 1912.

Millvina was just a baby at the time, just over two months old.

Her family was actually scheduled to be on another ship altogether, but that is how fate and chance and life work sometimes.  They had left her native Southampton, England for a new and better life in America where her father had dreams of opening a tobacco shop.

Millvina’s father was one of the 1,517 who perished on that awful night. She was one of the 706 people, along with her 2-year-old brother and mother, who survived.

She obviously doesn’t remember anything from that maiden voyage and its subsequent demise. And she always prefered it that way, not even wanting to witness film adaptations.

On Sunday she died in the Southhampton where she lived in her whole life…the town where 97 years ago her family set forth for brighter things on the ship that they were promised was “practically unsinkable.”

After just finishing a week on a giant cruise ship myself, enjoying our beautiful Honeymoon, it was hard to NOT imagine what it must have been like that tragic night in 1912. And when people sighed over the life boat drills, I felt like reminding them why they truly are so necessary.

Goodbye Millvina Dean. May you now be reunited with your loving parents. You and all the passengers of the RMS Titanic will never be forgotten.