Mr Ernest James Crease was born in Cleveland ¹, Cuyahoga, Ohio on 10 April 1892.

He was the son of English immigrant parents Alfred Joseph Crease (b. 1862) and Florence Peters (b. 1867), who hailed from Dorset and Somerset respectively and who had married in Surbiton, Surrey on 6 October 1888 with his father being described as a soldier at the time. His known siblings were: Jessie Mabel (1889-1975), Percival Alfred (1895-1987), Ruth Evelyn (b. 1899) and Harold Francis (1904-1983). Another sibling died in infancy.

Ernest's elder sister Jessie was born in London in 1889 before the family emigrated to the USA, settling in Cleveland where Ernest and his brother, Percival were born. A move took the Creases to Bronx, New York where his sister Ruth was born in 1899 and where the family appear on the 1900 census. The family relocated back to their native England sometime after this and the youngest child of the family, Harold was born in Yorkshire in 1904.

The family appear on the 1911 census living at 28 Regent Street, Spring Street, Bedminster, Bristol and Ernest was described as a tobacco factory labourer. The previous year an in-law from Cleveland, Rowland Edwin Stanley, had arrived to stay with relatives. Rowland's brother Albert had married Ernest's sister Jessie Mabel in Cleveland on 12 November 1910. Ernest would accompany Rowland on his return to Ohio.

Ernest and Rowland boarded the Titanic at Southampton as third class passengers (Ernest on ticket number 3464 which cost £8, 3s, 2d). Ernest described himself as a tinsmith.

Ernest and Rowland were both lost in the sinking; their bodies, if recovered, were never identified.

His family later moved back to Ohio and his mother and youngest sibling Harold crossed the Atlantic aboard the Imperator in 1920. It is believed that Ernest's parents later divorced and there is no sign of his father on the 1930 or 1940 Ohio censuses with his family. By the time of the 1940 census Florence Crease was living with her married daughter Jessie, now Mrs Cephus John Wadge.

Florence Crease died on 7 January 1956 in Bowling Green Wood, Ohio and was buried in Old Maplewood cemetery, North Baltimore, Wood County, Ohio.

Her daughter Jessie Wadge (nee Crease) died in Lorain, Ohio in 1975  is buried with her husband in Knollwood cemetery, Mayfield Heights, Guyahoga county, Ohio.