Margaret Brown

Margaret Tobin was born on 18 July, 1867, the daughter of Irish immigrants John and Johanna Tobin. Her father had been widowed with one daughter and her mother was widowed with one daughter also. They had 4 more children including Margaret and raised their six children in Hannibal, Missouri. Margaret worked stripping tobacco leaves as a young girl, and at the age of eighteen, she and her sister went to Leadville, Colorado. She met her future husband, James Joseph Brown, during the summer of 1886 and they were married on the 1st of September of that year when Margaret was only nineteen years of age. They had two children, Lawrence and Helen. When they were living in Leadville, J.J. made enormous profits from his Little Johnny Mine. They shipped out 135 tons of ore every day which gave them opportunities that they had not had before. Money came in and J.J. became a very successful miner. In 1894 they bought a home in Denver. She helped raise her brothers after their mother died young. On April 10, 1912, she was returning to America to visit her sick grandson. The ship she boarded was the famous Titanic. She boarded at Cherbourg, France and on April 14, 1912 the Titanic hit an iceberg while en route to America. Stewards soon woke passengers and told them to put on life jackets and prepare to get into the lifeboats. She stood near lifeboat 6, as singer Berthe Mayne refused to get into a lifeboat and tried to return to her cabin to get her jewels. Margaret soon convinced her to leave. She was then dropped 4 feet into the boat as it was lowered. When in the boat, the women became annoyed with Quartermaster Robert Hitchens who would not let them go back to the sinking ship and Margaret soon took over the boat. She later watched the Titanic sink. In 1914, she ran for The United States Senate and lost. She did a great deal of charity work throughout her life, much of it to help the devastated areas on the front lines of WWI. J.J. died on the 5th of September, 1922 and Margaret "Molly" Brown herself died on October 28, 1932.