Little Sidney Leslie Goodwin was laid to rest in Halifax's Fairview Lawn Cemetery nearly a century before anyone knew who he was. The toddler's body was plucked from the North Atlantic by crew members aboard the Mackay-Bennett, one of two cable ships tasked with recovering Titanic's dead after the ship sank on April 15, 1912.
"When they brought in this small child, tiny child, with no life-jacket, they were very much moved," says Alan Ruffman, a Halifax author and researcher who ultimately helped find the child's identity. "They resolved among themselves that if no one claimed this body, they would see that it got a decent burial."
Days later, the boy's remains were buried at the end of a row of Titanic victims, beneath a grey tombstone dedicated to an "unknown child."
It would be 90 years before he was finally given a name.
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| Diary of Clifford "Cliff" Crease (1888-1961). Courtesy The Nova Scotia Archives |
Of the 2209 passengers and crew on board, 1497 lost their lives. Within hours, the RMS Carpathia recovered 712 passengers at the scene; five were dead or subsequently died on board and were buried at sea. Two Halifax-based cable ships, the CS MacKay-Bennett and the CS Minia, were chartered within days, steamed to the site, and recovered the majority of the remaining bodies — 306 by the MacKay-Bennett and 17 by the Minia.
Altogether, some 337 bodies were plucked from the Atlantic.... One hundred and twenty-eight bodies were buried at sea and 209 brought to Halifax. Of the latter, 59 were claimed and shipped to other locations; the remaining 150 were buried at Fairview Lawn, Mount Olivet and Baron de Hirsch cemeteries.... We are proud to make this small contribution towards perpetuating the memory of those who died in Titanic's catastrophic end.
The online archive includes passenger lists, crew records, and registers of both victims and survivors. There are also coroner inquest files for bodies recovered at sea and headstone images for 121 victims who were buried in Halifax, Nova Scotia.Stay tuned - tomorrow we'll visit Nova Scotia's digital archives on the Titanic.
The collection is available for viewing this week with a simple registration instead of a subscription. The records can be found at www.ancestry.com/titanic.
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| J. Joseph Edgette at the family mausoleum of Isidor and Ida Straus, founders of Macy's, both of whom died on board the Titanic. Courtesy NY Times |
For the last hour, [J. Joseph Edgette, chair of the cemeteries and grave markers area of the American Culture Association] had been crisscrossing Woodlawn’s 313 acres, driving slowly and stopping to look at graves of passengers who died when the unsinkable ship went down 100 years ago, and survivors who were buried there later on. Of the passengers aboard the Titanic, more than 1,500 died, including more than 300 whose bodies were pulled from the water after the Cunard steamship Carpathia had picked up the survivors. (Of the bodies that were recovered, more than 115 were buried at sea. The rest were taken to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where 150 were buried in three cemeteries. The others were shipped out for burial by relatives.)
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| "Ross". A plate illustrated by R. R. McIan, from James Logan's The Clans of the Scottish Highlands, published in 1845. |
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| Joseph & Mabel Libby, 1940 Census, Barnsdall, Oklahoma |
