Eliza Gladys Dean was just 9 weeks old when her parents decided to emigrate to the United States to make a better life for themselves. They were planning to relocate to Wichita, Kansas, where they had relatives. The decision was life changing, and not in the way they had hoped. Eliza “Millvina” Dean was born at Culverwell House in Branscombe, on the south coast of Devon, England, on February 2, 1912, to Bertram Frank Dean (1886–1912) and Georgette Eva Light (1879–1975). She had an older brother, Bertram Vere Dean, born May 21, 1910. The life changing part of the emigration process was that they booked passage in steerage class on, none other than the Titanic. We all know the story of Titanic, but something you may not know is that the youngest passenger was just 9 weeks old. It is unknown why she was given the nickname Millvina, but she was that youngest passenger. Being in steerage was a detriment in itself for many of the passengers, but Bertram Dean felt Titanic’s collision with the iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, and after investigating, he returned to his cabin and told his wife to dress the children and go up onto the deck. That act of quick thinking, saved Millvina Dean, her mother, and her brother, who were placed in Lifeboat 10. Like most of the men on Titanic, Bertram Dean did not survive, and his body, if recovered, was never identified. 
As was the case with many of Titanic’s immigrant widows, Ettie Dean made the decision to go back to England, where her family was, once it was clear her husband had not been saved. Millvina later said, “We stayed in a hospital for two or three weeks for my mother to recover a little bit, and then we came back to England; because we had nothing, we had no clothes, we had no money and of course she was so broken-hearted, she just wanted to get home.” The White Star Line paid for Ettie and her children to return to England aboard RMS Adriatic. Millvina was a major attraction on the ship, mostly because everyone knew that not only was she the youngest Titanic passenger, but also the youngest survivor. An article in the Daily Mirror dated May 12, 1912, described the trip, “She was the pet of the liner during the voyage, and so keen was the rivalry between women to nurse this lovable mite of humanity that one of the officers decreed that first-class and second-class passengers might hold her in turn for no more than ten minutes.”
When she was grown, Millvina Dean, was a British civil servant, cartographer, and in the end, the last living survivor of the sinking of the RMS Titanic. In her seventies, Millvina became involved in Titanic-related events. She had not originally known that she was on Titanic, but was told when she was eight, as her mother prepared 
to remarry. Her brother, Bertram was also involved in Titanic events until his passing on April 14, 1982 (the 80th anniversary of Titanic’s sinking). He was 81 years old. Millvina Dean died of pneumonia on the morning of May 31, 2009, at a care home in Ashurst, Hampshire. She was 97 years old, and like her brother, her death had Titanic ties, because it coincided with the 98th anniversary of the Titanic’s launch on May 31, 1911. Millvina was cremated, and on October 24, 2009, her ashes were scattered from a launch at the docks in Southampton where the Titanic set sail. She never married and had no children.
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