The Story
We always knew that my great (great?) uncle was on the Titanic. My grandmother (and my mother) always told us about how he survived by dressing up as a woman and sneaking on a lifeboat. Not honorable but hey, he was third class, he wouldn't have survived anyway. And that sums up my grandmother's side of the family.

Anyway. Back when the Ellis Island website first became searchable and the manifest of the Titanic was not searchable, my mom spent a week searching for him. She found him on the Carpathia as one of the survivors. She couldn't find him at Ellis Island but when she finally figured out that someone dated all the papers three months ahead, she found him there.

But he was never on the official list of Titanic survivors. She searched and searched and looked and looked. She told me about how she started looking for him as a little girl but could never find him.

Well Titanic was on last night and I thought, hey, let's just try to look for him. And I went on Encyclopedia Titanica and looked at every page. No Philip Zennie on the lifeboats, no Philip Zennie in third, second or first class. I called my mom and told her that Titanic had inspired me to find him and we looked together. I got really excited because the site had biographies for every survivor. But we still couldn't find him. I sorted the survivors by age.

And then I found him.

We knew him as Philip Zennie. That's who he was on the Ellis Island site and that's who he was.

To the Titanic survivor list? He was Fahim Leeni. I don't know if maybe they didn't understand him or what. But there he is.

There was a newspaper article about him too. It sadly mentions nothing about dressing up as a woman. He apparently just hid under a bench.

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