A century ago, a 30-year-old passenger on the Lusitania named Minnie Campbell was minutes away from going down with the fast-sinking ocean liner, which had just been torpedoed by a German U-boat, when a Cunard Line employee pushed her into one of the last lifeboats launched into the Atlantic.
“You're just a tiny thing,” the seaman supposedly told the young Scot as he flung her into the nearly full lifeboat. From that boat Minnie watched the Lusitania slip beneath the frigid water off the coast of Ireland, killing nearly 1,200 people.
Adamina Campbell, my great-grandmother, was tiny, at under 5 feet tall and less than 100 pounds. It's a good thing she was so small, we like to say in my family, because it seems to have helped make her one of the 763 people who survived the infamous sinking.
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