Titanic survivor’s granddaughter recalls story
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POLSON — This year marks 100 years since the RMS Titanic sank on April 15, 1912. Known as one of the world’s largest peacetime maritime disasters, the supposedly unsinkable Titanic hit an iceberg at about 11:40 p.m. about 375 miles southeast of Newfoundland in the chilly waters of the Atlantic Ocean and went down at 2:20 a.m.
Of the 2,228 passengers on the ship, 712 survived. One of those was Guillaume DeMessemaker, a homesteader whose address was Tampico, Mont., which is west of Glasgow. DeMessemaker’s granddaughter, Rose Nelson Dehne, lives near Polson. Dehne said her grandfather died the year before she was born, so she never knew him. While there aren’t many family stories of the Titanic disaster, he told stories to his peers.
The story goes that DeMessemaker, born Dec. 30, 1875, in Wilisele, Belgium, and his brothers Emmanuel and Jacques, immigrated to the United States in 1901. Reports of unclaimed land in Montana drew the brothers west, and they homesteaded between Tampico and Vandalia.
William, or Bill, as he was known in Montana, had returned to his native Belgium in 1911 to visit family and marry. Anna, his new wife, and Bill boarded the Titanic at Southampton as third-class passengers. They were four days out to sea when the ship sank. According to an encyclopedia-titanica.org website report, Anna became hysterical when faced with separation from Bill, and he had to stuff her onto lifeboat 13. After a call from the officers for experienced crew, Bill rowed boat No. 15 all night and the couple was reunited on the Carpathia, the rescue ship. Anna never got over the tragedy and died in 1918.
Anna remained in Minnesota, and Bill returned to Montana. A few years after Anna’s death, he again crossed the Atlantic to Belgium. Dehne commented that he was a tough man to travel by boat again after the Titanic disaster. He met and married Marie Von Hamme in Paris in 1920.
Returning to the Milk River country, Bill and Marie raised four children, William, Eva, Esther and Rachel. They continued to ranch and raised sheep, cattle, goats and finally exclusively horses before they sold the ranch and moved into Glasgow. Bill died on June 5, 1955, and Marie passed away on May 22, 1983.
Dehne’s mother was Esther Nelson, and she grew up in Nashua, Mont. The old homestead, built of huge cottonwood logs, still stands, according to Dehne.
She will be attending the Watson Children’s Shelter event commemorating the Titanic disaster to be held in Missoula on April 14.
