I set out to tell a story that I thought I knew as well as my own name—the story of my great-uncle Albert Caldwell and how he survived the Titanic. I knew “Uncle Al,” as I called him, very well and heard the Titanic story from him multiple times. He lived to be ninety-one and died in 1977 when I was a senior in high school; I was old enough to develop a deep and permanent interest in this rarest of firsthand accounts.
However, the story turned out to be far rarer than Uncle Al had ever hinted. Al’s Titanic memorabilia came to my mother after he died, and his collection implied that there were parts of the story that my family and I had never known. There was, for instance, Al’s picture of himself; his wife, Sylvia; and their baby, Alden, on the deck of the Titanic. None of us had ever seen it. Eventually I tracked down Alden, whom I did not know, as Al had long ago divorced Sylvia and later had married my great-aunt Jennie Congleton. We were, therefore, Al’s second family, and we had no real connection to the first. Despite that gap, Alden was gracious in answering my questions and was pleased to see the picture again. I also tracked down his younger brother, Raymond, who likewise was thoughtful and delighted about the picture. But there were questions I didn’t ask before it was too late for them, either, and I regretted that none of the Caldwells lived long enough to know that I named my own son Alden in honor of my Titanic family.
My own Alden was fourteen before the secrets that his namesake family had held so tightly began to crack open under the scrutiny of research. I was astonished to find out that the Caldwells’ trip on the Titanic was one leg of an around-the-world escape from Siam to New York, with the Caldwells being hounded by, of all parties, the Presbyterian church. The Caldwells said they were running from Siam (now called Thailand) to save Sylvia’s health and sanity, while key churchmen suspected the Caldwells were fleeing under contrived circumstances and thus were contractually bound to repay the church a forbiddingly enormous sum of money. It took the Titanic to resolve the struggle.
But none of the surprising facts or the rich story behind them was obvious at the outset. As I tried to fill in what I thought were a few small gaps in my knowledge of the Caldwells’ Titanic story, I turned to cyber-space and happily stumbled upon two key people. First was Carolyn McHenry Elwess, the archivist for Park University, where Albert and Sylvia met in 1904 when it was still called Park College. Park was pivotal in Sylvia and Albert’s Titanic story. Not only did they meet there, but the college also helped set up the Caldwells as idealistic missionaries to Siam, an assignment from which they eventually fled via the ill-fated ship. Carolyn had done excellent research into the Caldwells’ student days. Her ongoing cascade of information from college publications and Park University’s Fishburn Archives was a godsend. Carolyn also put me in touch with Charles “Chuck” Caldwell, the Caldwells’ grandson, who jumped in with family memories. Particularly valuable was his knowledge of Sylvia, whom I knew little about. Chuck’s childhood memories and stash of family pictures were essential, as was his insightfully scientific approach that featured thoughtful logic and careful analysis. His many contacts in the world of Titanic researchers and his genealogical searches were invaluable. I rounded out the Titanic Trio, or Titanic Troika, as Carolyn called us, as I had known Albert well enough to consider him a grandfather. He had been brother-in-law to my own grandfather, Will Congleton, who died before I was born. Albert treated me like a granddaughter, stepping in where Will Congleton could not.
As much as Chuck, Carolyn, and I knew about the Caldwells, we quickly came to realize how much we had not known. As Chuck summed it up, “The more I find out, the less I know.” He certainly spoke for me in that case. It has been a marvelous trek through Al’s personal papers, Sylvia’s writings, the Presbyterian Historical Society, relatives’ memories, contacts with archivists and historians, the internet, and lots of theories, rejection of theories, dilemmas, discouragements, and delights, along with fine discussion by Titanic Trio. This book would not have been written without the help of the other two members of the Trio, but any misinterpretations or errors in stating information are my own, not Chuck’s or Carolyn’s or any other contributor’s.
I must thank David Sloan for suggesting I do the book. So many other people played key roles, too: Bill Romeiser’s audiotape of Al was priceless; Jim Congleton passed along information on a supposed bribe by Al aboard the Titanic; Liz Wells helped me date a pair of baby shoes that may have been Alden’s on the Titanic. Others furnished first-person accounts, photos, articles, and key information from the Caldwells’ era: Dan Barringer, George Behe, Robert Cisneros, Vera Williams Congleton, Dick Johnson, Jacky Johnson, Ed Kamuda, Bill Kemp, Dave Knopf, Bruce Parrish, Heather Richmond, John Robertson, and Virginia Congleton Romeiser. Several key people—Anne Conybeare Trach, Marcia A. Trach, Suda Carey, Mike Flannery, and Darryl Lee Salter—helped me grasp the Siam experience. I relied on technical assistance from Paula Noles (the genealogy wizard) and Gail Barton (the microfilm wizard). The map of the Caldwells’ route by my sister Jan Hedgepeth Wright and her daughter Eleanor Wright truly brought the Caldwells’ world to life. The rigorous analysis and thoughtful questions by my husband, Evan J. Williams, meant so much. My son Weston Williams was awfully tolerant to let me work out issues in the manuscript by talking them out loud as we drove to school each day. And a committee of old college friends, including Sarah Taylor and Wendy Gilmer, was so diligent in helping come up with the subtitle.
I want to add my deep appreciation for the multitude of other Titanic scholars who have studied many aspects of the ship’s short but infamous career. They have done intricate research and dazzling analysis. I may have relied on some of them here, but in the main I have not mentioned various points about the Titanic if the Caldwells didn’t seem to be aware of them. I relied mostly on the Caldwells’ vision, whether accurate or flawed.
As I worked on the research into that vast ocean of things I did not know, I spent a delightful spring break with my childhood family by the Atlantic in North Carolina, not too far from where Al Caldwell is buried. As we shivered through a chilly week, we recalled Uncle Al. My mother, Kay Congleton Hedgepeth, was Al’s niece by marriage and one of his heirs. My father, Lloyd Hedgepeth, had been so close to Al that Al took him aside the night before my parents’ wedding, saying, “I’m the oldest one here, so we need to have a little talk.” He proceeded to give my father the birds and bees talk, which we all found hilarious and so Al-like, especially since Dad had already had “the talk” from his own father. “Well,” Dad quipped, “Al was the oldest one there!” Al considered Dad like a son, just as he had long considered my mother to be like a daughter. When Mom was a child, Al was often part of her life, whether treating her to the automat food vendor (an amazement for a small-town girl) or listening to her piano practice (the ultimate sacrifice for a parent-figure) or making up silly lyrics to her recital piece, the morbidly titled “Dolly’s Funeral.”
During that cold beach week, my sisters, Jan Wright and Anne Hedgepeth, contributed their memories of Al and his Titanic stories and then joined me in a fruitless search through the internet to determine if perhaps Sylvia had been pregnant on the Titanic, our momentary notion as to why various crewmen encouraged Al to pass to or get on board the lifeboat on that fateful April night in 1912. By the time it got to 2:20 A.M., we remembered the Titanic had sunk at 2:20 as well, and it was time for bed. Our pregnancy theory, like so many others, sank as quickly as the Titanic did, but we had a lot of fun tossing about theories and memories.
As we finally concluded during that spring break week, memory is a very slippery fish. Whether it was our memory or Al’s as he left to us personally or Sylvia’s through her published accounts or through their grandson, or whether it was through the archives at Park University or at the Presbyterian Historical Society, it was clear that no two memories were exactly the same. In fact, sometimes the same story told by the same person in two different interviews varied a little or a lot. As I wrote, I had to figure out which version of the story was the most accurate. I generally tried first to take words straight from Albert and Sylvia and people they knew or met, and the closer to the time period the better. After that I relied on interviews with people in various branches of Albert’s and Sylvia’s families—people who had heard the story of the Titanic from them—followed last by information from later historians. I hope I have chosen well and have made critical discrepancies clear. Sometimes I had to guess based on the wispiest evidence, and I have tried to explain those educated guesses in the text or the source notes. Except where changes were necessary for clarity, I retained original spelling and punctuation in quoted material.
At first, the information about the Caldwells seemed to be a mishmash of facts, questions, and confusion. When the tangled threads were straightened out as much as they could be, however, they made a rich and colorful tapestry of the Caldwells’ lives.
The story recounted here, as many people collectively remember it, is the best that fallible memories can produce.
The original manuscript of A Rare Titanic Family includes 780 footnotes. As my publisher pointed out, most readers don’t want to read so many notes. On the other hand, the publisher understood that Titanic historians might want to know intricate details of sources, especially where the Caldwells’ accounts—as they came to me—seem to deviate from other accounts of the Titanic.
Thus the footnotes have been preserved in an alternate edition, befitting of the internet age: the fully footnoted manuscript lives on as an ebook and is available at www.newsouthbooks.com/titanic.
Meanwhile, we agreed I would write a narrative essay about my sources to tell general readers where my information came from. That essay appears at the end of this edition. I regret already that I had to leave out some sources in that shortened account. I am grateful to each of my sources, whether they are included in the source essay or only appear in the full footnoted version.