John B. Thayer Titanic Memorial Collection

The John B. Thayer Memorial Collection of the sinking of the Titanic was started in memory of John Borland Thayer Sr. who died in 1912 during the sinking of the ocean liner’s maiden voyage. Thayer’s wife, Marian Longstreth Morris Thayer, and son, John B. “Jack” Thayer, survived the tragedy; the latter began the collection by providing testimony of the incident to various news outlets and saving many clippings of said testimony. The collection, started by Jack Thayer in 1912 and continued by his descendants until 2014, is largely made up of ephemera including, but not limited to: a copyright certificate, a funeral program for Thayer Sr., photographs of the Thayer family, newspaper clippings (documenting Thayer’s survivor’s testimony, the construction of Titanic memorials, the discovery and display of recovered artifacts from the sunken ship, and the deaths of Titanic survivors through the years) and letters of solicitation from important re-tellers of Titanic’s history, such as the Titanic Historical Society, Captain Richard Fremont-Smith (Thayer’s cousin and facilitator of the republication of Thayer’s memoir), and the production office of James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic.

History

I want to focus my writing on the function of the collection as a historical body that showcases the progression of social and cultural memory of trauma as it relates to the Titanic tragedy. I think the collection is historically significant as the Thayer family’s efforts to memorialize their patriarch, recount their trauma and keep the Thayer legacy alive change over time. Beginning with news clipping of Jack’s individual oral history as a Titanic survivor, the collection grows, as times passes, and manifests more official and authoritative efforts to memorialize the tragedy, including Jack’s privately published memoir, the public re-publishing of the same memoir by his cousin, and documentation of James Cameron’s efforts to authenticate his film by consulting Thayer family records.

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  John Borland Thayer Sr.

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  Marian Longstreth Morris Thayer

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  John Borland Thayer Jr.

Notable Items

Newspaper Scrapbook

from over 57 newspapers nationwide.

Columbus, OH Dispatch, April 21, 1912