Olaus Abelseth

Olaus Abelseth tried vacationing in Canada to calm his nerves following his ordeal on the Titanic, but found that simply going back to work was just what he needed. Returning to the South Dakota farm he had first homesteaded in 1908, he raised cattle and sheep for the next thirty years before retiring in North Dakota where he died in 1980.

Madeleine Astor

Madeleine Astor inherited from her husband the income from a five-million-dollar trust fund and the use of him homes on Fifth Avenue and in Newport so long as she did not marry. In August 1912, she gave birth to a son who was named after his father. She relinquished the Astor income and mansions during World War 1 to marry William K. Dick of New York, and by him had two more sons. She divorced Dick in Reno, Nevada, in 1933 to marry Italian prize-fighter Enzo Fiermonte. Five years later, this marriage also ended in divorce. She died in Palm Beech, Florida, in 1940 at the age of forty-seven.

Nellie Becker

Nellie Becker and her three children settled in Benton Harbour, Michigan, until her husband's arrival from India the following year. It was apparent to him and their older daughter, Ruth, that Nellie's personality had changed since the disaster. She was far more nervous and was now given to emotional outbursts. Until her death in 1961, she was never able to discuss the Titanic disaster without dissolving into tears. Her younger daughter, Marion Becker, contracted tuberculosis at a young age and died in Glendale, California, in 1944. Richard Becker became a singer and later a social welfare officer. Widowed twice, he passed away in 1975.

Ruth Becker

Ruth Becker attended high school and college in Ohio, after which she taught high school in Kansas. She married a classmate, Daniel Blanchard, and after their divorce twenty years later, she resumed her teaching career. Like mote survivors, she refused to talk about the sinking, and her own children, when younger, did not know she had been on the Titanic. It was only after her retirement, when she was living in Santa Barbara, California, that she began speaking about it, granting interviews and attending conventions of the Titanic Historical Society. In March of 1990, she made her first sea voyage since 1912, a cruise to Mexico. She passed away later that year at the age of ninety.

Richard and Sallie Beckwith

Richard and Sallie Beckwith continued to travel, and entertained frequently at their homes in New York City and Squam Lake, New Hampshire. Richard died in New York in 1933 and his wife in that city in 1955.

Karl Behr and Helen Newsom

Karl Behr and Helen Newsom were married in March of 1913, amid sensational newspaper coverage that claimed he had proposed in the lifeboat. He continued to play tennis and, through 1915, was ranked among the top ten players. During his business career, Behr was director of Herman Behr Company, a vice-president of Dillon, Read and Company, and on the board of may corporations including Goodyear Tire and Rubber, and National Cash Register. He was also nominated for the position of governor to the territory of Alaska. After his death in 1949, Helen married Dean Mathey, another tennis player and a good friend of her first husband. She died in New Jersey in 1965.

Joseph Boxhall

Joseph Boxhall, fourth officer on the Titanic, attained a command with the Royal Navy but was never made captain while in the merchant service. He left the sea in 1940 and in 1958 acted as technical advisor to the film, "A Night to Remember." Following his death in 1967, his ashes were scattered over the ocean in the vicinity of the Titanic's sinking.

Harold Bride

Harold Bride kept a very low profile in the years following the disaster. World War 1 found him as the wireless operator aboard a tiny steamer, the Mona's Isle. He later embarked on a career as a salesman before retiring to Scotland where he passed away in April 1956.

Molly Brown

Molly Brown's life took a surprising turn after the sinking. While previously, her efforts to be accepted by Denver society had been unsuccessful, the selflessness and heroism she had shown during the disaster prompted her neighbours, for a short time, to open their doors to her, In 1914, she was named as a potential candidate for Congress. As time passed, however, she grew increasingly eccentric. Her husband died intestate and she found herself at odds with her children over his money. In 1932, at the age of sixty-five, she died suddenly in New York City of a stroke. It was only after her death, when she became the subject of the hit Broadway musical and film, "The Unsinkable Molly Brown," that she gained the fame she would have so enjoyed in life.

Kate Buss

Kate Buss safely reached San Diego, where she and her fianc�e, Samuel Willis, were married on May 11, 1912. Together they raised a daughter, whom they named after Lilian Carter, and after their retirement moved to Pasadena to be closer to her. After Sam's death in 1953, Kate followed her daughter to Oregon where her son-in-law was a minister. She was never able to discuss the Titanic disaster without becoming emotional and weeping. She died in Oregon in 1972 at the age of ninety-six.

Selena Cook

Selena Cook's husband eventually followed her to the United States and the two settled in Pennsylvania. She was an officer in the Daughters of the King organisation and was active in her church and her local historical society. She died in 1964.

Frederick Fleet

Frederick Fleet, the lookout who first sighted the iceberg that sank the Titanic, left the sea in 1936. He worked for Harland and Wolff's Southampton shipyard during World War II, after which he became a night watchman for the Union Castle Line. As he moved into old age, he sold newspapers on a street corner in Southampton. In 1965, despondent over his finances and the recent loss of his wife, Fleet took his own life.

Colonel Archibald Gracie

Colonel Archibald Gracie became the first serious historian of the Titanic disaster, corresponding with other survivors and collecting data for his excellent work, "The Truth About the Titanic". Regrettably, his book was published posthumously; Colonel Gracie's health declined until he passed away in December of 1912. The second survivor to die, he was preceded by three-year-old Eugenie Baclini, a Lebanese immigrant who had succumbed to meningitis the previous August.

Esther Hart

Esther Hart and her daughter, Eva, remained in New York only long enough to arrange passage back to England, their hopes of a new life in Canada having died with Benjamin Hart. Esther never remarried, and died on cancer in 1928. After her mother's death, Eva Hart moved to Australia and embarked on a singing career. Eventually she returned to England and for many years was an industrial welfare officer and magistrate. She received an MBE for her social work. In 1987, she was one of the most outspoken critics of the expedition that recovered artefacts from the wreck of the Titanic.

Robert Hichens

Robert Hichens, the quartermaster who had been at the wheel of the time of the Titanic's collision, eventually relocated to South Africa where he became the harbour-master at Cape Town. In the 1920s, he confided to an officer of a ship then in port that the White Star Line had arranged for his move and new career in order to silence him. Hichens' testimony at the inquiries gave no indication that he was hiding anything, and it is more likely that the White Star Line didn't know what to do with the man who had steered the Titanic into an iceberg. Sailors were notoriously superstitious, and Hichens, though innocent of any responsibility for the disaster, was probably unwelcome aboard other ships.

J. Bruce Ismay

J. Bruce Ismay retired as planned from the International Mercantile Marine in June 1913, but the position of managing director of the White Star Line that he had hoped to retain was denied him. Surviving the Titanic disaster made him far too unpopular with the public. He spent his remaining years alternating between his homes in London and Ireland. Because Ismay had never had many close friends, and subsequently had few business contacts, it was mistakenly assumed that he had become a recluse. He did enjoy being kept informed of shipping news but those around him were forbidden to mention the Titanic. He died in 1937.

Marie Jerwan

Marie Jerwan suffered from nightmares and panic attacks for weeks following the disaster. Eventually she recovered, but her later years were plagued with misfortune. She battle cancer for decades, was seriously injured in a car accident and, in 1974, at the age of eighty-six, died soon after breaking her hip.

Charles H. Lightoller

Charles H. Lightoller, the Titanic's senior surviving officer, did his best to protect his employers at the two official inquiries that followed the shipwreck but later found his career blocked by the disaster. The command of any of the White Star vessels seemed to elude him, and it was only during World War 1, while serving with the Royal Navy, that he was made a commander. After the war he found work ashore for several years before opening his own guesthouse and ultimately becoming a successful chicken farmer. During World War II he used his private yacht, the Sundowner, to assist in the evacuation at Dunkirk. He passed away in December 1952.

Harold Lowe

Harold Lowe like other officers of the Titanic, never became a captain while in the merchant service but attained the rank of commander while serving in the Royal Naval Reserve during World War I. He eventually left the sea and returned to his home in North Wales where he became very active civically and sat on the local town council. He died in 1944.

Edmond Navratil

After returning to France with his mother and brother, Edmond Navratil grew up, married, and embarked on a career as an interior decorator, later becoming an architect and builder. He served in the French Army during World War II, and was imprisoned in a German prisoner-of-war camp. He escaped, but his health did not recover from the ordeal, and he died at the age of forty-three. Michael Navratil married a fellow student in 1933 while studying philosophy at a university. He eventually earned his doctorate and became a professor of psychology. In 1987, for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the disaster, he returned to the United States for the first time since 1912, to attend a reunion of survivors arranged by the Titanic Historical Society. He now lives in retirement in France.

Major Arthur Peuchen

Rumours circulated in Canadian military circles that Major Arthur Peuchen would not be receiving promotion to Lieutenant-Colonel of the Queen's Own Rifles, an advancement which had been practically assured before the disaster. On May 21, 1912, the promotion was indeed given, but within a few years the stigma which followed many of the male survivors - of having lived when so may men had died - caused him to leave Ontario and eventually settle in Alberta. He died there in 1929.

Herbert Pitman

Herbert Pitman remained at sea for thirty-five more years, although failing vision forced him to leave the bridge and join the purser's staff. For a period, he even found himself serving aboard the Olympic. A widower, he retired to the town of Pitcombe, England, where he lived with a niece until his death in December 1961.

Emily Ryerson

After her arrival in New York, Emily Ryerson attended funeral services for her son and her husband. During the First World War, she assisted Herbert Hoover in working for the American Fund for the French Wounded, for which she received the Croix de Guerre. She divided her time between her home in Chicago and the family summer home in Cooperstown, New York, and also made frequent trips abroad. In Peking she met Forsythe Sherfesee, a financial advisor to the Chinese Government, and the two were married in 1927. She left Chicago for a house in Cap Ferrat, France, and died in 1939 while vacationing Montevideo, Uruguay.

Elmer and Juliet Taylor

Elmer and Juliet Taylor returned to the United States in 1914 to live but continued to cross the Atlantic frequently, often on the Olympic. Mrs. Taylor died suddenly in April 1927, and her husband remarried twice before passing away in 1949. By the time of his death, he had crossed the Atlantic sixty times.

Marian Thayer

Marian Thayer never remarried following the Titanic disaster, and lived out her life in Haverford, Pennsylvania. She died on April 14, 1944. He son, Jack Thayer, graduated from University of Pennsylvania and went into banking, later returning to his alma mater as treasurer and financial vice-president. Throughout his life he was haunted by the memory of the Titanic sinking and in 1945, despondent over the death of a son in the war, he took his own life.

Edwina Troutt

Edwina Troutt suffered emotionally for months following the sinking. In 1916 she moved to Southern California to escape the eastern winters, married a baker, and settled in Beverly Hills. Eventually she put the Titanic experience behind her and for forty years rarely mentioned it. She ultimately outlived three husbands during forty-seven years of retirement in Hermosa Beach, California. Often interviewed about her experiences, she became a celebrity as a Titanic survivor. In Hermosa Beach, however, she was better known for her many civic activities. She died in 1984, five months after her 100th birthday.

Eleanor Widener

Eleanor Widener devoted much of the rest of her life to extensive charitable works, the most notable of which was the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library which she built for Harvard University. In 1915, she married Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice of New York City, a noted geographer and explorer. She and her husband also travelled extensively in Europe and India. She passed away in Paris in 1937.

R. Norris Williams

R. Norris Williams, along with a handful of other European survivors, took the return maiden voyage of the France home in May, 1912. He went back to America several months later to enter Harvard and continue his tennis career. By the end of the year, he was ranked second in the United States and by the mid-1920s, had twice won the National Amateur Singles tennis championship and twice the U.S. Doubles championship. After World War I. in which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour from France, he embarked on a career as an investment banker. For twenty-two years he was a director of the Philadelphia Historical Society, retiring only a few years before his death in 1968.

Marion Wright

Marion Wright and her fianc�e, Arthur Woolcott, were married in New York at St. Christopher's Chapel on April 20. The following day they headed west to Cottage Grove, Oregon, where they raised three sons. Marion never liked to speak of the Titanic but would do so on the anniversary of the sinking for those friends or family who were interested. Arthur died in 1961, and Marion in 1965.