Annie Frankum, 36, of Detroit, Michigan, United States, was traveling third class on board Lusitania with her husband Joseph, their 6-year-old son Francis, 4-year-old son Frederick, and their 10-month-old daughter Winifred. The family was going to see Joseph’s mother, who lived in Birmingham, England. When the ship was struck, the family was below decks in third class.
The Frankums were from England and moved to Canada, where Annie gave birth to Frederick, and then moved to Detroit, where Winifred was born. In the United States, Joseph and Annie had been Sunday school teachers. Joseph believed that it would be good for the family to relocate to England, and so they booked passage aboard Lusitania. They were having a cup of tea and preparing their luggage when the torpedo hit.
From the Manchester Guardian, Monday, 10 May 1915, page 8:
“We divined what it was immediately,” he said, “and I took up the children and hurried my wife to the boat deck. I put them all in a boat, and went below for a lifebelt. I found two, and on my way back I gave one to a man, but afterwards I was sorry I did not keep it for my wife. She had got out of the boat again, and we waited [on the port side], because for a time we thought the ship was going to keep afloat. When it was certain that she was sinking I put my wife back in the boat and clambered in myself. We saw that it was not free of the ship, but thought it would float off as the ship sank. To our horror, it went right down, and I seemed to sink a long way before I felt myself rising again. It was a dreadful sensation.
“When I came to the top I could not see anything of my wife and children. I swam to an upturned boat, but it was terribly difficult because of the wreckage which kept striking me. I got on the boat with others, and we were like this for about three hours, while dead bodies in all postures were floating about us. A young man was condoling with me because I had lost my wife and children, when a man’s body floated by. He turned the head up with an oar and shouted out, ‘That is my father.’ Then we tried to comfort each other. At Queenstown I went searching everywhere, and at last found my little boy, but I have now no hope that my wife and the other two children have been saved.”
Annie, Frederick, and Winifred were lost in the disaster. Their bodies were either not recovered or never identified.
Related pages
The Frankum Family at the Mixed Claims Commission
Links of Interest
References:
Kalafus, Jim and Michael Poirier (2005). Lest We Forget: Part 1 ET Research. <http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/lusitania-lest-we-forget.html>
“His Wife’s Lifebelt.” Manchester Guardian, Monday, 10 May 1915, page 8.
Annie Frankum was Annie Maria Booth Watson born in Coventry Warwickshire in 1880. Her parents were James Watson and Elizabeth Jeayes. Her sister Mary Matilda Watson had married Joseph’s brother Alfred in 1898. Annie and Joseph Frankum had married in London Ontario Canada in 1906. Annie and their 2 boys crossed the border to live in Detroit in 1911.
The Coventry Standard 21 May 1915 reported the loss of “Mrs Frankum, the grandaughter of Mr George Jeayes, an old Coventry man, and cousin of Mrs A Pargetter, and two of her children …. Mrs Frankum and her husband, with their three children, were returning from Canada to at Aston, and while she and her two little ones were drowned, Mr Frankum and the other child were saved.”
Annie Frankum was my first cousin 3 times removed.