Anthony Abbing - Titanic Third Class Passenger
Anthony Abbing, at around 42 years of age, was an American third class passenger travelling home alone aboard Titanic to the place where he was born. He boarded the ship in Southampton on Wednesday 10th April 1912. He is believed to have held Ticket No. 5547, and to have paid seven pounds and eleven shillings to buy the ticket. Alphabetically his name is at the very top of Titanic’s passenger list.
Anthony Abbing, the son of German immigrants Gerhard Heinrich Abbing and Catharina Abbing, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA in 1870. He became a blacksmith, and at some point he moved to South Africa to work there. Around 1908 is the date given by most sources of information about him for him moving to South Africa, but some recent articles have given or indicated that it was in or around 1902 that he made the move there. He is not known to have married.
The reason that he was travelling back to America was that he had decided to go back to Cincinnati, Ohio, possibly to visit his mother, who may have been ill. It is unclear to us whether he was just visiting or had decided to permanently return home.
Sadly nothing at all else is known about him during the voyage, and tragically he did not survive the disaster. His body was not identified or known to have been recovered from the wreck site.
At his family’s burial plot in St Mary’s Cemetery, St Bernard, Ohio, included on the family’s headstone is an inscription that says: “In memory of our brother died on Titanic”.Related pages - Titanic's First Class Passengers, All Titanic Pages
