Frederic Kimber Seward's descendants heard that the Titanic crew asked "Grampok" if he could pilot a boat. As there is much sailing and rowing in the families of his children Kim, Kaye and Bill, and it is certainly in all of our blood to be up on deck to appreciate the ocean, we quite like the story that his sailing in Monument Beach days got him into Lifeboat #7, when they still thought they'd be rowing back for breakfast.
Surely the tuxedo we have was not actually from the night of the sinking, because, if we can claim him as our ancestor at all, that outfit would have been ruined from salt and the sweat of rowing, and a few days of sleeping on the
Carpathia, says me, Katharine's daughter who rows lifeboats for fun. We did send it out for the costume designers to use as inspiration for the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. The lining is kind of scratchy for wearing, so I would bet it was hastily ordered upon his return to replace what went down, with, ahem, who cares about tuxedos when there were many tuxedo-and-non-tuxedo-toting souls! It is grim to imagine the ethical dilemmas facing them, with their very real human faces, in the quiet and awful dying sounds on the chilled glassy sea.
My mother, who lived with him and then his famed Irish housekeeper Annie, after he died, said Grampok never talked about it except that calm night on the Gardner's Borogove. The lore about the Gibsons came more from all of you researchers, and we haven't found much to add.
Family lore includes pride of his rewarding the crew of the
Carpathia with medals. Some of his descendants serve on the Mariner's House in Boston, and others coach rowing.
Per Once Over Lightly, the memoir by Frederic Kimber Seward's grandson, Kim, (FKS II), who passed away in 2020, Secretary of State William Henry Seward had his own son named Frederick Seward, who got a bit of a bashing in the assassination attempt, while the Frederic Kimber Sewards are descended from WHS's brother George Washington Seward, via his son, the Sweden-Borgian Reverend Samuel Swayze Seward -- thus the parishioners of his father's church who were aboard.