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Kyrila Scully.
Scully, Kyrila (editor). Titanic: The Survivors. A Manifest of the Lifeboats. limited, 1st printing, SIGNED by the author. Boynton Beach, FL: by the author. June, 2002. wraps. isbn: none. scarcity: very scarce.

The focus of this book is as complete and exhaustive an account of who made it into Titanic’s lifeboats as is possible using modern research and methods. The lifeboats are examined in the order in which they left the ship, starting with lifeboat #7 about 12:45 a.m. and ending with collapsible A, which washed off the sinking liner at 2:15 in the morning. The author breaks down the list of occupants by their respective classes, and finishes with the members of the crew who made it into each boat. She has taken this launch sequence from the British Board of Trade Inquiry.

Scully includes a lot of basic information about most of the passengers, including their full name, maiden name, their residence or destination, where they boarded, what class ticket they had, and what cabin they used, their age at the time of the disaster, and how long they lived afterwards. She adds brief (typically a sentence or two) biographical notes about many of the passengers, mostly anecdotal about who they were traveling with, who they married, etc. I'd guess that roughly 50% of the passengers have some additional comment about them.

The effectiveness of this book as a research tool is hampered by the lack of an alphabetical index of the entire passenger and crew referencing which lifeboat they were in. If you didn't know that Dorothy Gibson was in lifeboat #7, for example, there is no way to easily find the information about her in the book. This is particularly frustrating as Scully does list the entire passenger list by class, and crew compliment at the end of the book, but only uses this index to give each passenger’s age at death a second time.

Aside from the lack of an index, I enjoyed this book quite a bit. There are now several titles that concentrate on passenger and/or crew lists, but remarkably few that focus on the story of the lifeboats. This book fills a niche that has been mostly ignored.