100th Anniversary Empress Of Ireland RIP

The tug Eureka and the launch Lady Evelyn had just returned to dock from picking up the pilot from and exchanging mail with the outbound Empress Of Ireland when they were ordered to turn around immediately and head back out, the Empress was sinking.

                  It had only been the previous afternoon of May 28, 1914 at about 4:30 when the Canadian Pacific steamship set sail from Quebec City down the St. Lawrence River bound for Liverpool.  On board were 1,479 passengers and crew, including a contingent of delegates of Salvation Army people bound for a convention in England.

                  The pilot had been dropped off at 1:20 AM at about the same time the mail was exchanged. A short time later at about 1:38 the lights of a steamer, the Norwegian collier Storstad, were sighted heading upstream. Fog quickly enveloped both ships. At about 1:55 the crew of the Empress were shocked to see the Storstad heading right towards them. The captain ordered full speed ahead, but it was too late and Storstad hit the Empress between the two funnels opening up a 350 square foot hole. The mortally wounded Empress turned on its side and 14 minutes after the collision it was on the bottom of the St. Lawrence.

                  Of the 1,477 passengers and crew on board only 465 survived. More passengers died on the Empress Of Ireland than on the Titanic. The official inquiry held in June, 1914, conducted by Lord Mersey, who also conducted the inquiries into the loss of the Titanic and the Lusitania, found the Storstad at fault for altering course. However, the Storstad intended a port to port passing while the Empress intended a starboard to starboard passing. Something similar occurred in 1956 in the collision between the Stockholm and Andrea Doria. Other factors contributing to the sinking were both the portholes and the watertight doors were open allowing the ship to sink quickly, factors also contributing to the rapid sinking of the Lusitania the following year.

                  Thomas Anderson captained the Storstad and Henry George Kendall captained the Empress Of Ireland. Kendall never went to sea again after the sinking.

                  Following the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915 a story arose of a fireman named Frank “Lucky” Tower who supposedly survived the sinkings of the Titanic, Empress Of Ireland and Lusitania. Many decades afterwards when it was found that no such man was a member of the crew of any of the three ships the story was thought to be a legend. Research by Senan Molony suggests that the original story was based on the misspelling of a fireman named Frank Toner, who survived the Lusitania and claimed to have survived the sinkings of the other two ships as well.

                  No such man is listed as a member of the crew of either the Titanic or the Empress Of Ireland. Furthermore no further record is found of Frank Toner, who simply disappeared. Molony suggests that Frank Toner was really William Clark, who was a crew member of both ships and survived. In comparing the two men he noticed a number of similarities suggesting they were one in the same person.

                  For further information on this see http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/lucky-tower.html

                  Incidentally despite being the worse maritime disaster in Canadian history Canada AM, which spent a week in North Ireland for the Titanic’s anniversary, devoted a mere five minutes to the disaster. This speaks volumes.

                  I first learned of the Empress Of Ireland in the 1970s from a book on Canadian disasters and from the book Great Ship Disasters by A. A. Hoehling. The date also marks the anniversary of my wife and I first meeting face to face. (We met online.)

                  For additional information on the Empress Of Ireland see

                  Wikipedia’s article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Empress_of_Ireland

                  Encyclopedia Titanica’s article

http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/empress-of-ireland.html

                  PBS Except From “Lost Liners”

http://www.pbs.org/lostliners/empress.html

                  Short Video Of The Empress Of Ireland

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgVcPUJjnKg

Head Hunters

There’s a saying in computers garbage in garbage out. Basically it means if you put in erroneous data you’ll get out erroneous data. The same sort of thing happens with genealogy. Poor research equals poor family trees.

                  As an amateur genealogist I’ve been utterly amazed at just how much junk genealogy there is, especially on the Net. Like many who are researching their family tree I use Rootsweb World Connect. However most genealogies on it – I would roughly guess at least 60% and these are of the ones with sources. - are very poorly done. These are people whose goal seems solely to collect the names of real or imagined ancestors. I call them “head hunters”.

                  Frequently what they do is copy gedcoms. This becomes very frustrating when you’re looking for sources and see nothing but gedcoms as the source. So if there is a mistake in a date they all make the same mistake. One such set of mistakes had one man married to two women with the same last name on the same day in the 1600s. I didn’t count how many times that had been copied.

                  There are those who have people born in a place that didn’t exist at the time, like Massachusetts in the 1590s. One genealogy had a woman giving birth to children after she had died. Other genealogies corrected the mistake by saying the woman had died sometime after the date the others listed as her death.

Some people, it seems, are too lazy or just too blind to do something as fundamental as double checking at least some of their facts. Twice I’ve come across ancestors of mine who were supposedly the son of a Mayflower passenger. A quick check taking no more than about two or three minutes discovered they weren’t. (Incidentally I really do descend from two Mayflower passengers – William Brewster and his wife Mary. This has been verified through good genealogy.)

                  My favorite horrific mistake is the genealogy that had one woman married to a man who was born about 15 years after she died and having children by him in the 1400s. I didn’t know they could freeze embryos then.

                  To be fair we all make careless and honest mistakes. We transpose a letter or a date here and another one there. We get people mixed up.

                  One of the most common types of honest mistakes are confusing two people with the same name. I have one ancestor whose name is John Proctor married to a Martha Harper who went from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s. Around the same time another John Proctor possibly married to an Allis Graye went from England to the Virginia Colony. The two are frequently confused. It took me a little digging to finally figure this out.

                  However, most mistakes can be found by simply keeping your eyes open for what does not make sense and then by doing a little digging. Usually all it takes is an hour or two of research, which too many people seem unwilling to do. So open your eyes people.