Last American TITANIC Survivor Dies

[82Rigger]

Boston. Mass

(AP) Lillian Gertrud Asplund was just 5 years old when she and her family boarded the Titanic in Southampton, England, on their way back to Massachusetts.

That night in 1912, she lost her father and three brothers _ including a fraternal twin _ when the "practically unsinkable" ship went down in the Atlantic after hitting an iceberg.

Asplund, 99, the last survivor of the Titanic who remembered its sinking, died Saturday at her home in Shrewsbury, said Ronald E. Johnson, vice president of the Nordgren Memorial Chapel in Worcester, Mass.

Asplund's mother, Selma, and another brother, Felix, who was 3, also survived the Titanic sinking in the early morning of April 15, 1912. The Asplund family had boarded the ship as third-class passengers on their way back to Worcester from their ancestral homeland, Sweden, where they had spent several years.

Lillian was the last survivor old enough at the time of the sinking to remember the events.

Two other survivors are living, but they were too young to remember what happened. Barbara Joyce West Dainton of Truro, England, was 10 months old and Elizabeth Gladys "Millvina" Dean of Southampton, England, was 2 months old.