Survivors of Titanic connected to Amsterdam
Two women from city chronicled their stories
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, 07-09-05
Two women with connections to Amsterdam survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. One was born in Amsterdam and the other spent her final days at a local nursing home.
The Amsterdam native who survived the famous ship disaster was Jane Anne Forby Hoyt. Born in 1877, she attended Amsterdam High School and worked as a stenographer. Her parents were Mr. and Mrs. Frank Forby of 30 Chestnut Street. Her father was a health inspector.
In 1906, Jane Forby moved to New York City after marrying Frederick Hoyt, a businessman and yachtsman. According to The Recorder, they booked passage on the Titanic’s maiden voyage to New York partly because Frederick Hoyt knew the captain, Edward J. Smith, and the ship’s surgeon, Dr. William O’Loughlin.
In an interview after their rescue, Jane Hoyt said that she had felt the reversing of the ship’s engines in the middle of that night to remember and “saw something white” going by. Dr. O’Loughlin told the Hoyts to get dressed and assemble on deck where lifeboats were being loaded following the collision with an iceberg. The Hoyts abandoned their lifeboat seats when a crush of people came from steerage. Jane Hoyt was convinced to get aboard the last lifeboat that successfully left the Titanic.
Frederick Hoyt’s rescue is detailed in a 1912 article in the Paterson Morning Call in New Jersey. After leaving his wife in the lifeboat, Hoyt went to the bridge and joined Captain Smith in a stiff drink in the Captain’s stateroom. Hoyt then went to a lower deck and jumped into the water.
Hoyt was found by a lifeboat crew, dragged on board and, according to the newspaper, “One of the women passengers saw his almost naked condition and in pitiful compassion drew from about her shoulders a long fur robe and threw it about the half frozen man.”
The compassionate woman was Jane Anne Hoyt and, according to the newspaper, she shrieked, “My God it’s my husband.”
Several hours later, the Cunard liner Carpathia picked up their lifeboat.
Frank Forby traveled by train from Amsterdam to New York City to meet the Carpathia when his daughter and her husband arrived on April 18th. Jane Hoyt died in 1932 in Long Beach, California. Her husband died in New York City in 1940.
Another Titanic survivor died at Mount Loretto Nursing Home in the Town of Amsterdam in 1959 at the age of 83. A native of Washington, D.C., Miss Marie C. Young was well connected, having given piano lessons to the children of President Theodore Roosevelt. She was on the Titanic as a traveling companion to Mrs. J. Stuart White of New York City. Both were rescued.
Young lived in New York City until she entered Mount Loretto. The only relative listed in her Recorder obituary was a great niece in Loudonville.
Young wrote an article about the Titanic for the National Magazine. She also denied a story that she had conversed with Presidential aide Archibald Butt as the disaster unfolded. Butt, who died that night, had been a military attaché to Presidents Roosevelt and Taft. In a letter to Taft, Young said, “The alleged interview (with Major Butt) is entirely an invention, by some officious reporter; who thereby brought much distress to many of Major Butt's near relatives and friends. When they wrote me of what a comfort the story was to them, I had to tell them it was untrue, as no such deception could be carried through.”
She said she last saw Major Butt before the disaster as he was walking on deck.
Some information for this article was taken from the website: http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org and the history files of the Amsterdam Free Library.
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