Alice Cleaver picture or photograph

[Inger Sheil]

Ah, Shelley - I was a romantic child, and I'd desperately hoped that Anna Anderson was a lost princess. It would have been good to believe that someone survived the bloodbath at Ekaterinburg. Peter Kurth's book on the subject was so utterly convincing, so scholarly, so apparently well researched and written! It put a big dent in my faith in conspiracy theories when the DNA tests finally demonstrated that all the "evidence" regarding Anastasia's survival came to naught.

James is right in that there will always be those who go for a romantic alternative rather than a cold truth. I'd like to think it's because they prefer to believe Lorraine Allison (and Thomas Andrews, and E J Smith) went on and lived rather than died a terrifying death. I don't think compassion is the motive in many instances, however.

I am pleased to report that although I was suckered by the Anastasia case, I never bought the idea that J Wilkes Booth survived - or Thomas Andrews.

 

[Shelley Dziedzic]

I bought into the Anastasia myth too until I saw an interview with an ageing Anna when she was nasty, mean, devious and positively revolting. Her imbecile and pugnacious husband was with her exhibiting her like a sideshow and glorying in his royal connection. It was appalling. Then I realized what a fraud she was and how the unsuspecting public, rolling in the notion of a spun-sugar fairytale -had been duped for so many decades. I was devastated the day Titanic was found- my dreamy notion of her lying pristine and unbroken and filled with mystery was dashed. Such is real life.

 

[Jim Kalafus]

If you want to read up on the final and most irritating of the Anastasia mysteries, read Dr. William Maples great book on Forensic Identification, Dead Men Do Tell Tales, and Robert Massie's follow up to Nicholas and Alexandra. It was more or less conclusively proved that Anastasia's body was NOT recovered from the burial site (she didn't survive, however, her body and that of Alexei being buried at another as of yet undiscovered site) but an odd combination of pride on the part of the Russian doctors who misidentified the body and Romanov family politics made it imperative that "Body #6" was her, and so in the end it was.

The Anna Anderson fraud was so apparent to me even at ten years old that I could NEVER believe it....and this from a kid who believed in Borley Rectory. I used to laugh when her "interrogators" would set up a situation like this:
Q: Do you remember a time when we were 12 years old and I fell on the ice and you laughed?

Anna: Yes.

And then turn that around so that it appeared Anna Anderson supplied all of the relevant information.

Nostradamus- another "don't get me started" topic.

 

[Senan Molony]

I got another letter this week about someone who was spouting of on radio about being a descendant of a Titanic passenger named Marcus Breathnach. No such name in the passenger list, of course.
"Passenger lists could easily be incomplete!" is always the cry. We had someone making such claims on this message board lately.
Unfortunately, in the case of alleged survivors, such a resort is no longer the bolt-hole it might once have been. Not since NARA rediscovered the misfiled Carpathia immigration lists.
When you think about it, it is this simple:
If the Titanic was carrying unregistered, unticketed, unlisted passengers - then how come precisely NO unticketed, unregistered, unlisted passengers showed up on the Carpathia?
After all the Cunarder saved over 700! At least some of these legions of spurious passenger claimants ought to have been saved!
In years gone by, the "secretly saved" brigade would always point to the garbled wireless messages of passenger names, very often finding similar concoctions to those they desire. The rediscovered immigration lists however are crystal clear - all are listed, and all survivors previously appeared on the passenger list, although there were certainly misspellings, particularly in steerage.
Thus are frauds exposed - like the Wilhelm Muller cited in Diana Bristow's "Sinking the Myths", although he literally swam away from some obvious drawbacks by claiming he and his similarly unlisted employer managed to stay together (!) find a piece of wreckage for flotsam together (!!) and be picked up by a German tanker the next day (!!!), both of them surviving (!!!!), but nobody seeing the need to publicly exult in the amazing rescue when the ship next made port (!!!!!)

Yeah, Nostradamus - that was a bad oul' World War Three conflagration we had there in the 1990s, wasn't it?

 

[Michael H. Standart]

I thought civilisation was done for when I saw all those mushroom clouds, but then I found out the neighbors were using too much lighting fluid on thier charcoal.

So much for Nostradamas. (Shrug)

Cordially,
Michael H. Standart

 

[Elaine R Barnes]

I think Carpathia would have foundered herself with all the unticketed, unregistered and unlisted passageners there were aboard her!

 

[Daniel Rosenshine]

Senan, How recent is this NARA list find. They did have some list but various pages were missing. Is this the list you're talking about or are ALL the pages now found?

Daniel.

 

[Jim Kalafus]

NOSTRADAMUS: To borrow a quote "is to B*llsh*t as Dom Perignon is To Champagne." I had trouble reconciling HIS doomsday date (1999) with that of the equally (well, once equally) well know and rabidly defended Mother Shipton (1991) which sometimes appeared in the same books. What was a paranoiac to do? The Mask Of Nostradamus (James Randi) should be required reading. Someone too close to me to be named here once horrified me by becoming the client of a psychic named N. Nostradamus, with predictable results.

GOOD TO HEAR about that Immigration list turning up. Of course it will not deter claimants from saying "well, who says that is impossible for someone to miss being on the ticketing list, passenger list, published newspaper lists AND the immigration list!" Not impossible of course, but so improbable that it is barely worth considering.

Myself, if I were going to perpetuate a fraud, I would go into the archive and find one of the 30 or so people Phillip Gowan hasn't managed to track down and see how long I could run with it before someone proved otherwise. Try proving I'm NOT a descendent of Fang Lang. That "not ticketed" ruse is just too easily exposed.

 

[Mike Herbold]

For those who have never seen copies of the Carpathia lists on NARA
http://media.nara.gov/media/images/51/1/carp01a.jpg
To go from list to list, just change the last number before the a. The lists are incomplete as far as what can be accessed from online.

The first public notice that they were found was in an article by Robert Bracken in Titanic International's "Voyage" 29 in 1998-9. They were actually found by an NARA employee named Richard Gelbke, who looked through 43 rolls of microfilm before finally finding the Carpathia lists. They ended up being in the records filed on June 18, 1912 instead of April 18th. If anybody has ever looked for anything on microfilm, they can appreciate how many Excedrin headaches it takes to go through 43 rolls.

James: A word to the wise on trying to evade the long arm of Titanic law; Phil Gowan would have captured Richard Kimble on the first Friday night.

 

[Jim Kalafus]

Mike: Thanks for the warning. I was being jocular, of course, and just speculating about the approach I MIGHT have taken were I in the mood to attempt to defraud the ET people. It wouldn't be worth the inevitible public humiliation 'though, as I am sure that several experts would immediately step in and expose my ruse.