Millvina Dean, the youngest survivor of the Titanic, which sank in 1912, has died at the age of 97.  She was just over 2 months old at the time the Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912.   The luxury ocean-liner, which didn’t have enough lifeboats for all of it’s 2,200 passengers and crew, sank in less than three hours.  Dean was one of 706 people,  mostly women and children, who survived.  Her father was among the 1,517 who died. 

Dean was 97 and she died where she had lived, in Southampton, the English port city her family had tried to leave behind when it took the ship’s ill-fated maiden voyage, bound for America.

Dean’s family were setting out for a new life in the United States.  Her father had sold his pub and hoped to open a tobacconists’ shop in Kansas City, MO.  Initially scheduled to travel on another ship, the family was transferred to the Titanic because of a coal strike. 

Dean said her father’s quick actions saved his family. Bertram Dean, 27, felt the ship scrape the iceberg and hustled the family out of its third-class quarters and toward the lifeboat that would take them to safety. “That’s partly what saved us – because he was so quick. Some people thought the ship was unsinkable,” Dean said in 1998.  Wrapped in a sack, Dean was lowered into a lifeboat.  Her brother Berram, 2, and her mother, Georgette, 32, also survived. 

The family was taken to New York, then returned to England.  Dean did not know she had been aboard the Titanic until she was 8, when her mother, about to remarry, told her about her father’s death. 

Born in London on February 2, 1912, Elizabeth Gladys “Millvina” Dean spent most of her life in Southampton, the Titanic’s home port.  She never married and worked as a secretary, retiring in 1972.

If you are interested in local information for the Fargo-Moorhead area, you can click on http://www.directoryoffargomoorhead.com/.