As those of you who have been keeping across Titanicdock.com will know, my grandfather, Ruddick Millar was orphaned by the Titanic tragedy at the age of 5. His father, Thomas who was an Assistant Deck Engineer was planning a new life based in New York but never reached his destination. However, that is in no way the end of the story for the Millar family.  My grandfather and his older brother were sent to live with a widowed aunt in the tiny village of Boneybefore just outside Carrickfergus. In the past few months I have been trying to find out more about what life was like for these two boys who had lost both parents in the space of three months at the beginning of 1912.

As they are passed down through the generations, family stories have a way of getting distorted and ours is no less the case even though it is based around a famous historical event. When I was a youngster, my father took me to see an old stone house which stands in the middle of Boneybefore village and told me that this was the house in which my grandfather had been brought up after being orphaned by Titanic. A few weeks ago I found out this was wrong. Family photographs uncovered from an old suitcase showed an old lady in widow’s clothes standing in the half doorway of a cottage across the road from the big house. The lady is Mary Millar, my grandfather’s aunt and the mother of eight children. This family of nine, plus two additions after April 1912, lived in one tiny cottage with two small bedrooms downstairs and a large attic room. It had no kitchen. The cooking was done over an open fire. It is to this day a thatched cottage straight out of a story book and I recently met its current owners. Alison and Robbie Brennen run the cottage as self catering accommodation and although they have changed the internal layout somewhat due to a fire, the essence of the place remains the same. I can almost imagine my grandfather as a small boy sleeping under the eaves of this little house. He describes sailing paper boats and catching sticklebacks in the nearby stream. The stream has now been culverted and runs under the railway line but the heart of this tiny hamlet remains virtually unchanged. The big house which goes under the name Maida Vale belonged to the oldest of the children, Harry Millar who built it himself. Mary and her daughters moved to Atlantic Avenue in Belfast in the late 1920’s.

Despite my grandfather having written down so many of his early experiences as a Titanic orphan, I am still finding out little nuggets of information which prove that the Titanic story does not come to an end in April 1912.