A Titanic Undertaking

This April, the RMS Titanic will turn 105 years old — or it would have, had it not sunk at sea during its maiden voyage. A ship of astronomic size and ambition, the Titanic has become a modern legend. It has been the subject of or inspiration for dozens of films and literary works. It has its own traveling museum exhibit, is the subject of several Broadway musicals and even spawned new definitions for the word that was its namesake.

In honor of this occasion, I’m searching across the country for everything I can find that might shed new light on what happened before and after the tragedy, including how it impacted the ship’s crew, her passengers, her parent company and government agencies responsible for these people and things. I’m hoping we might learn some new tidbits that will help humanize lives lost or bring us new understanding of what happened in the wake of these events. As an added bonus, I hope this project can serve as a glimpse into the approaches that someone who uses freedom of information laws on a daily basis might take when investigating something new.

Some of these requests will be federal and some of them will be to state or municipal agencies. Many will be to agencies and bodies that existed when the RMS Titanic was launched, but others might be to agencies formed more recently in case there might be some new information to learn from how the events are being discussed today.