Historical Voyage: Celebrating the Titanic Centenary

Over 200,000 documents concerning the ill-fated Titanic’s passengers and crew have been published, marking the centenary of the notorious disaster.

The unique material was published on the British Ancestry website, the world’s largest online family history resource.

The photographs, family records, notes and other memorabilia of the ship’s passengers and crew will be available for public view until May 31, 2012. The records hold data about the survivors along with information on those who perished.

The documents include the Wills of the Titanic’s Captain Edward Smith, and of prominent American entrepreneurs Benjamin Guggenheim and Colonel Jacob Astor, all three of whom died when the ship sank.

A separate section is dedicated to the Carpathia vessel, which helped rescue some 700 passengers drifting in the ocean in lifeboats.

To mark the approaching centenary of the most famous shipwreck in history, more than a thousand relatives of the victims have embarked on a Memorial Cruise. With 1,309 people onboard – the same number as were on the Titanic – the Balmoral will repeat the legendary ship’s route which is from Southampton to New York, the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on 15 April 1912, after crashing into an iceberg.