Jirjis Yūsuf Tu'mah was a child passenger on the Titanic.
Background[]
Jirjis Yūsuf Tu'mah was the son of a married couple from Tibnīn in Syria. This is where Jirjis was born as well on the 9th of February 1904. He had one older sister named Mariyam, who had been born in 1902. His parents were Darwīsh Tu’mah and the much younger Hinnah Yūsuf Rāzī. They lived in Tibnīn which was a village in what is nowadays part of the Lebanon.
Darwīsh went to the United States in 1905 as he wanted to find better work with more payment. He managed to find another onion farm in Silver Creek in Michigan. For a dollar a day, he could help out. There’s also been said that he helped with the construction of train rails. In 1911, he had purchased a farm just north of Dowagiac along the Dowagiac Creek. By late February 1912, he was able to send for his family.
His wife, with the children, then undertook a long, tiring journey on the 26th of February, a journey that would take some days to the big city and port of Beirut. A cargo ship would let people board for the passage to Marseilles from there. The family was on it. In Marseilles, they would be checked for their health. Then, a train was going to Paris and from there to Cherbourg. This is where they had to be for the large crossing to America.
Titanic[]
Jirjis was 8 years old when he and his family were in Cherbourg on the evening of April 10, when a large steamer had appeared. This is where they would get on to complete their large journey. Her name was Titanic and it was her Maiden Voyage. Due to her size, she could not dock so a smaller tender brought the passengers to her. Jirjis and his family were Third Class passengers so they were on a seperate tender from the other classes.
For Jirjis, this was a very awesome time. Through his later interviews, it was more than obvious that he was deeply awe-struck and impressed by the vessel, on the inside even more than on the outside. With Mariayam, he strolled or ran around on the ship and took interest in all kinds of empty cabins or places that were all new to him and his sister. They dashed up and down the staircases a lot.
On April 14, the Titanic got in a very precarious situation. For what had been a pretty quiet voyage, the ship was in an icefield in the night and not visible till the last moment, there was an iceberg, right ahead of the bow. They couldn’t do anything to prevent a collision, which was felt by Hinnah, who was outside of her cabin and got her hand stuck in a door which made a small cut on her finger. The impact felt as just a thud. She went to clean her wound but was worried for a while now as her daughter was missing. Mariayam couldn’t be found anywhere as she had ran off to explore some more spaces on the ship. Stewards had come to see the steerage passengers and told them everything was okay and they could continue with their business. Getting upstairs was not necessary according to them.They followed the instructions and some of them sent up prayers. A few were too keen and curious and had gone up top anyway, after which they came back to communicate to Hinnah and others that there had been an iceberg collision.
Hinnah woke her son. She had no time to lose and he had to get dressed. With the help of stewards, she was brought up on the Boat Deck and once they were there, she said to Jirjis that he had to stand near a lifeboat and not go anywhere. Jirjis obeyed and waited. Hinnah managed to find and fetch Mariyam and got back to the Boat Deck quickly. Jirjis was still there, to her great relief. It hadn’t been easy for him. Some people tried to get him into a boat already but he had stood ground, it seems. Together, they could now take shelter in a lifeboat and be lowered away from the sinking ship.
At 2:20 A.M, the death of Titanic was at hand. Mother felt it was not a sight for children and rightly so, as a horrific spectacle took place. She protected her children by covering their eyes as all this happened in front of their lifeboat. She did the right thing, as this must have saved the children from a lot of trauma as in later life, Jirjis, was incredibly enthousiastic about the few days he was on board Titanic. Lots of other survivors who saw it occur, would be haunted by it, in their dreams and everyday life. Even still, Jirjis remembered the sight of Titanic's rising stern later.
After the sinking[]
In the early morning of April 15, help was on its way and got to Titanic’s coördinates at 4:00 P.M. It was a ship named the RMS Carpathia. Titanic was long gone by then but the remaining souls were more than grateful that they would not be lost at sea. The Carpathia spent the morning collecting the remaining boats and those that survived. With everyone aboard, she turned her bow towards New York and left the wreck site.
It was April 18, when the family could disembark in New York and they were soon in the hands of the doctors and nurses of St Vincent’s Hospital. Having been cleared to go, Jirjis with mother and sister could go to Dowagiac as planned, with the help of a relief fund which gave Hinnah money for the trip. In May, they would receive more financial aid.
For the father, the sinking of the Titanic did reach him but he could not have known it was his son, daughter and wife that were part of it all. Not until Hinnah’s delayed telegram reached him, he found out. A story goes that the news was told to him by a brother and that he chased after his brother in anger as it supposedly was his idea to plan out the whole emigration.
Later life[]
With the reunion of the whole family, they were now residents of Dowagiac and lived a good life. Siblings would follow as well. Three brothers came into the family. In 1913, it was Sam, who was added to the family. The family was further expanded by Francis in 1914 and Joseph in 1916.
Naturalisation came after some time. His name was now George Thomas, while his mother was referred to as ‘Anna’ and Mariayam as ‘Maria’. After having lived in Dowagiac for 8 years, the grown family moved to Michigan City in Indiana. They left once again after just 3 years, to finally establish themselves in Burton, Michigan. Here, George and his father opened up a grocery store somewhere in the 1920s and worked together. In 1926, George pled his vows to a woman from Indiana named Rose Howser. Two daughters and a son appeared from their bond. The first was Emily in 1927, then they had Joseph Louis in 1928 and lastly Beatrice in 1933.
Rose and George still lived with Anna and Darwis in Flint in Michigan for some years. It was not long after the birth of their last child however, that the pair disbanded their connection. What the cause of their failed promise was is not known, but separation followed.
He found a new love named Dorothy Lucille Lane, née Pickett. She was also from a broken marriage and came from Indiana as well. She gave him a son in 1936, just after taking their promises to eachother on March 22. His name was George.
George’s store had gotten so profitable that he could make it into a supermarket thanks to the help of his father and brothers. The brothers could take over in the 1940s and he tried to manage another more modest shop in the meantime. He made a career switch in 1948, when he went from the groceries to do real estate investments. He kept doing this till 1970.
Next to being a busy man, he was willing to tell more about his time on Titanic when the media asked him about it. Although he could never forget the cries he heard from the people in distress, for him, the voyage was above all a pleasurable experience as he and his sister had played that they were on a smaller adventure inside the ship as they got to see several parts it by running around everywhere.
In 1982, George was in a wheelchair but that couldn’t stop him from meeting up with fellow ex-Titanic passengers. He was an associate of the Titanic Historical Society of Philidelphia which held a convention at which he was present. He remained a resident of Flint during all these years.
On October 31, 1991, George lost Dorothy and thus was widowed. He only lived for just over a month after her passing. George died on 9 December 9, 1991 at the age of 87 following a stroke.
Legacy[]
His son Joseph Louis was able to gather information from his grandmother Anna, who was widowed in 1962 and lived with him, his wife and 4 children for 14 years during the 1960s and 1970s. In modern times, to honor her and his brother and sister, he wrote a book about the lives of the three Tu’mahs who were passengers on the Titanic and about their ordeal and time during the Maiden Voyage. The book, ‘Grandma survived the Titanic’, came out in 2002.