Goodwin family updated biographies

Ticket number CA2144 cost £46 18s 0d.

There is a memorial to the whole family at Melksham, Wiltshire in a church.

Property lost valued at $250. $150 Red Cross awarded to sister and her husband to cover money loaned by them. Mother granted 5s per week by the English fund.

London address: 10 Vernon Street, Fulham.

Probate report: Goodwin Augusta, of Watsons Court, Melksham, Wiltshire. Administration, London 19th September 1912 to Clara Ann Berry, wife of Ernest Albert Berry. Effects £26.11.0d.

No. 159. (English). A family of husband, 42 years old, wife 44 and six children ranging in age from 18 months to 16 years, were lost. Goods valued at $250 were lost with them. His widowed sister living in this country had sent $50, and his brother-in-law, also living here, had sent $100, to help pay the passage. They were unable to stand the loss of this money. The man's mother, 72 years old, lives in England, with her were two sons, one 37 years old, a cripple unable to work, and the other a carpenter's assistant, 35 years old. The son who was lost had helped support his mother. Investigation established the accuracy of the facts given. This Committee refunded the $150 borrowed from sister and brother-in-law, and referred the case of the mother to the English Committee, which granted a pension of 5 shillings a week. ($150).

(From The Night Lives On, Walter Lord, page 94-96)

Frederick Goodwin was no ordinary emigrant. He was a 40-year-old electrical engineer who lived with his wife, Augusta, and their six children in a small but neat house in Fulham. As the family grew, Mr. Goodwin began looking around for new opportunities. His brother, Thomas had already left the old country and settled in Niagara Falls, New York; so when Thomas wrote of an opening at the big power station there, Frederick jumped at the chance.

He got rid of the house in Fulham, paused briefly at Melksham, and booked passage for himself and family on one of the more modest steamers operating out of Southampton. But because of the coal strike they were transferred to the Titanic.

Mrs. Goodwin's sister did not learn of the family's death until a week after the disaster. In an interview with the Daily Mirror she told how she was on her way to attend a service for the victims the following Sunday when she met Mr. Goodwin's mother. The elder lady, not knowing that Mrs. Berry didn't know the family had sailed on the Titanic, handed her a telegram saying the whole family was lost. Mrs. Berry stated that Mr. Goodwin was a compositor by trade and had been married eighteen years.