Who was Millvina Dean, youngest survivor of Titanic and lived to 97

Millvina Dean was just nine weeks old when she boarded the Titanic with her parents and older brother in 1912. She was the ship’s youngest passenger. Her mother, Georgette, her father, Bertram Frank, and her brother, Bertram Vere boarded the Titanic before it set off from Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912.

But she wasn’t intended to be aboard the Titanic in the first place. The Deans boarded the ship after their first journey was canceled due to a coal strike. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Dean family was intended to cross the Atlantic on a different White Star Line ship, but their initial voyage was canceled due to a coal strike. Instead, White Star Line offered them third-class tickets on the Titanic.

According to Millvina Dean’s obituary in The New York Times, the Deans were traveling to Missouri to visit her father’s cousin, who had a store in Kansas City. After the Deans sold the tavern they owned in England, her father planned to co-own the store.

The Titanic collided with an iceberg and sunk on April 14, 1912. Millvina, her mother, and her 2-year-old brother all survived, but her father perished along with the many other third-class men who were not permitted to board lifeboats.

Three weeks after the sinking of the Titanic, the RMS Adriatic took some survivors back to England. Dean, her mother, and brother were onboard.

“Passengers who knew what the family had been through lined up to hold baby Millvina, the youngest survivor of the Titanic. To keep the line moving, a ship’s officer ordered that no one could hold the baby for more than 10 minutes,” wrote Mary Rourke of the Los Angeles Times in Millvina’s obituary.

Millvina died in 2009, at the age of 97. She was the last live survivor of the Titanic, which sank on April 15, 1912. Millvina’s ashes were thrown at the Southampton Docks, where the Titanic embarked on her first and final voyage, by her partner, Bruno Nordmanis.