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The last American survivor of the Titanic PDF Print E-mail
Written by DeadGirl   
Monday, 08 May 2006
May 7, 2006

The last American survivor of the Titanic sinking has died.

Lillian Gertrud Asplund "went to sleep peacefully" on Saturday at her home in Shrewsbury, Mass., according to a funeral home spokesperson. She was 99. At five years old, Asplund, her parents and her four brothers were third-class passengers on the luxury ocean liner. They were returning to their home of Worcester, Mass. from their ancestral homeland of Sweden.

When the ship went down in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland after hitting an iceberg on April 15, 1912, only her mother Selma and one of her brothers, three-year-old Felix, survived.

Her father and three other brothers, including a fraternal twin, lost their lives.

"I could see the icebergs for a great distance around ... It was cold and the little ones were cuddling close to one another and trying to keep from under the feet of the many excited people...," Selma Asplund described to a Massachusetts newspaper shortly after the sinking. "My little girl, Lillie, accompanied me, and my husband said 'Go ahead, we will get into one of the other boats.' He smiled as he said it."

Lillian Asplund was the last Titanic survivor who could remember the frightening events, but she rarely spoke about them and didn’t like to be in the spotlight. She never married and worked at secretarial jobs for most of her life.

Selma Asplund died on the 52nd anniversary of the sinking in 1964, while Felix Asplund passed away in 1983 at the age of 73.

There are at least two other survivors still alive – Barbara Joyce West Dainton of Truro, England and Elizabeth Gladys 'Millvini' Dean of Southampton, England – but they were both less than a year old when the sinking occurred and too young to have any memories of the disaster.

http://www.pulse24.com/News/Top_Story/20060507-007/page.asp
 
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