The Last Titanic Survivor

Millvana Dean was the last survivor of the RMS Titanic when she died in May of 2009. In 1912, Her family decided to emigrate to Kansas from the United Kingdom in the hope of opening a tobacco shop in Witchata.  The Deans were originally scheduled to travel on a different ocean liner, but were transferred to the RMS Titanic when their ship’s schedule was complicated because of a coal strike.  This minor scheduling change, which her parents probably thought of as fortunate luck at the time, would change Millvana’s life forever. Her ship would sink, her father would drown, and her mother’s world would unravel.

Millvana, her mother Ettie, and her two-year-old brother were sleeping in their cabin when her father felt the ship strike the iceberg. Bertram Frank Dean was a 25 year old farmer, and he was a cautious man. After leaving his room to investigate the alarming sound of the collision, he returned and instructed his wife to go on deck and try to find a lifeboat. Ettie woke her babies and dressed them. Bertram walked his family to the deck of the enormous ocean liner where they were sent to Lifeboat 10. Once in the lifeboat, Ettie called out for her husband to pass her son over the railing, but Betram had walked away with the toddler, and Ettie was forced to leave with out them. Ettie assumed that her husband and son would be rescued together. In the frantic attempt to load women and children first, the toddler was saved on another lifeboat. Millvana and her mother were among the first of the third-class passengers to escape the doomed ship.

Before she left him, Bertram told his wife he would follow them on another lifeboat. His body, if it was found, was never identified.

With two young children, Millvana’s mother couldn’t stay in America after losing her husband.  She returned to England on theRMS Adriatic and lived with her parents there.  Ettie didn’t tell her daughter that she had been aboard the RMS Titanic until Millvana was eight years old and her mother decided to remarry.

Millvana died in 2009.

Read more about Titanic on our Stories From The Titanic blog...