It was the most heartbreaking disaster of it’s time. The sinking of the Titanic killed many of it’s passengers and crew. Me, even though it is the year 2002 and I am only 16, I know every detail there was to the disaster. You see my great grandparents were aboard the great ocean liner. Both my parents and grand parents have told me again and again how my great grandparents met and fell in love on the Titanic. Their relationship wasn’t like others, they often told me.

        I’m up in the attic of my great grandfather’s old house and I’m looking through an old wooden chest that holds all his memories of my great grandmother. He kept it hidden from everyone up until he died, but I found it when me and my family moved into his old house. I wonder why he kept it hidden and never told anyone about it. I guess he wanted to keep that part of his life private. It probably caused him a lot of pain just to think about it.

        I opened the chest and came upon many items that must have been very close to his heart. There were old photographs, letters, and jewellery that I assumed belonged to my great grand mother. I never met my great grandmother or my great grandfather, so I’m glad I have pictures of them, and stories that my family can tell me about them.

        It was getting late and I was sitting on the floor in the attic looking over old photos when I came across an old, black folder that had the words, PRIVATE, printed on it. I contemplated whether to open it or not. A few seconds later, I opened the folder up. I hesitated a minute before I looked down and saw what was inside.

        No one knew anything about my great grandmother before she met my great grandfather. Her past has been a total mystery. My grandparent’s said that they thought she came on the Titanic alone, going to meet her family in New York. My parent’s always thought that something bad happened to her when she was younger, that’s why no one knew anything. My great grandfather never said anything about it, so they just assumed he didn’t know, either. But from what I can see in these photographs that are in the folder, I can see that he knew all right.

        In the black folder were a stack of five photographs, all taken before the Titanic even set sail. They were pictures of a woman named Hannah Jobane, who was my great grandmother. From the inscriptions on the back, I was starting to get a little better idea of what could have happened to her before she boarded the Titanic. The first few pictures were of her standing in front of an orphanage. The last few were of her in a place I couldn’t recognize cause the pictures had been badly developed and were really dark.

        I put the pictures back in the folder. And out of the corner of my eye, I could see there was something tucked in at the back of the folder. I carefully pulled it out from it’s confinement in the folder and placed it on the floor. I had only noticed it because it was shining brightly. Nobody could have missed it. It was a tiny pin, but you couldn’t miss the huge diamond in the middle, that was the size of a quarter.

        At the very back of the folder I found a letter. A letter that was about ten pages long.

        It’s been a long time, but now I am finally ready to tell of my journey on the Titanic. It’s been hard for a long, long time and I haven’t been able to talk about it because it hurts so much to talk about it. You all have wondered for years what happened to cause me to be the way I was. Well, now I am ready to tell you the story that I’ve kept locked deep in my heart. Now I am going to tell you the story of the experience that changed my life…