You know the storyline, as been told and retold like in the 1997 movie Titanic. And you may have seen images like these, the wreckage of a disaster that killed more than 1,500 people when the ship that had been touted as unsinkable hit an iceberg and sunk. Its wreckage was found more than seventy years later, in 1985. But how much do you know about them, the people on the ship that set sail from Southampton England with massive publicity on April 10th, 1912, heading for New York?
This is who they were: their names, professions, ages, what class tickets they had, at which stop they would have disembarked. The original handwritten passenger list has been published for the first time, by the website findmypast. com. The site says it was allowed to scan the list kept in Britain's National Archives. It includes survivors who have told their stories over the years.
It was a beautiful ship; it was too good to go down.
The thirty-four-page list does not include those who boarded in France, such as the legendary Molly Brown. The website says that list was lost, or never collected by British authorities. But there are well known figures including the Countess of Rothes, who survived along with her cousin and maid, and a couple who helped inspire the movie, Henry Morley and Kate Phillips, they were eloping to New York and registered under the name Marshall. The list does not include the ship's crew.
All those who died are being remembered Sunday in a ceremony at Southampton, the spot where the voyage began nearly a century ago.
Joshua Levs, CNN, Atlanta.