Remembering Titanic: Where the Passengers Are Buried

“So you've been Titanic-ing,” Susan Olsen, the staff historian at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, said when J. Joseph Edgette walked in.

Indeed he had. Mr. Edgette is, among other things, an expert on where the “Titanic people,” as he calls them, were buried.

For the last hour, he had been crisscrossing Woodlawn's 313 acres, driving slowly and stopping to look at graves of passengers who died when the unsinkable ship went down 100 years ago, and survivors who were buried there later on. Of the passengers aboard the Titanic, more than 1,500 died, including more than 300 whose bodies were pulled from the water after the Cunard steamship Carpathia had picked up the survivors. (Of the bodies that were recovered, more than 115 were buried at sea. The rest were taken to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where 150 were buried in three cemeteries. The others were shipped out for burial by relatives.)

Mr. Edgette knows his way around cemeteries. He is the chairman of the cemeteries and gravemarkers area of the American Culture Association and the secretary of the board of the Association for Gravestone Studies. He mentioned a dinner with Robert Ballard, the explorer who discovered the Titanic shipwreck in 1985. “He explained that when those bodies went down, they stayed down,” Mr. Edgette said. “He said: ‘You see these shoes down there? There used to be bodies in those shoes. The body parts deteriorated, and the skeletal remains decalcified. The only thing left are the shoes, and the leather is perfectly preserved.'”

Mr. Edgette said Woodlawn had 12 “Titanic people,” more than any cemetery in the United States. Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn has nine, he said, not counting the mayor at the time, William J. Gaynor, who coordinated the arrival of the rescue ship Carpathia, or F.A.O. Schwarz, the toy store owner. (A Schwarz teddy bear survived the Titanic, he said. It was the companion of a 6-year-old boy who had been on board. He and his family made it into one of the lifeboats, and he marveled at the ice that floated by, saying, “Look at the beautiful North Pole with no Santa Claus on it.”)

Some of the graves at Woodlawn mention the Titanic. “Lost his life on the S.S. Titanic,” reads the tombstone of Charles H. Chapman, a second-class passenger.

Some tombstones say nothing about the unsinkable ship. Arthur Ernest Nicholson's gravestone says only, “Died April 15, 1912.”

And some say more than nothing but less than everything. The tomb of Isidor Straus, a co-founder of Macy's and a former congressman, says, “Lost at sea. April 15, 1912.” The tomb, a replica of an Egyptian funeral barge, carries an inscription from the Bible (11 words from Solomon 8:7) but no mention of the Titanic.

“When the time came” for Ida Straus to climb into the lifeboat and leave her husband behind — he was offered a seat but turned it down because there were still women and children on the doomed ship — “she said there was no sense in parting now,” Mr. Edgette said, noting that they had been married for more than 40 years. “They were last seen retiring to their cabins. He was No. 96 of the 329 bodies.” Mrs. Straus's body was never found.

The tomb for him and cenotaph for her is outside a mausoleum for their sons. Inside is a plaque commemorating the Strauses that was originally at the Macy's store on 34th Street. “Glad it was saved,” Mr. Edgette said. “Glad to see it's here. It probably would have been melted down, because that's what's happening in cemeteries across America, and for pennies on the dollar.”