According to the publisher’s website, this is the true story of a Lebanese immigrant Anna Thomas (Youseff, Toma or Touma) bound for Michigan who traveled third class with her two small children, Maria and George, on the Titanic. Despite not knowing a word of English, Anna Thomas managed to get herself and her family into one of the lifeboats. They were amongst the very few Lebanese passengers to survive the sinking.

If you were expecting to read a third class survivor’s account of the disaster, you will be disappointed. Anna’s account, as told to the author, her grandson, is all of three page long. Even as a biography of the three survivors, this book is a letdown as there is very little information about Anna of her two children in the book. Most of the biographical information is about the author himself.

In addition, this has to be one of the most padded books I have seen in quite a while. Of the 122 pages in the book, only about a third of them are about the Thomas family. Most of the rest of the book contains excerpts from the American Senate and British Board of Trade inquiries, with an additional pictorial section of photographs taken from Jack Winocour’s book. None of this material has any direct relation to the Thomas family story with the possible exception of a brief few pages taken from the inquiries that tell about the lifeboat they were in, which the author claims was number 2. Most of my other research material seems to indicate the Thomases were actually in collapsible C, however.

The one thing that shines through in this book is that the author truly loved his grandmother, and wanted her to be remembered. It is too bad there is so little actual material about her or her experiences included in this book to give the reader more than the merest inkling of who she was.

For more information including ordering instructions, see the listing on the publisher's website, Trafford Publishing.

My thanks to Fiona Nitschke for finding this one.