>Why was Isadore Strauss' body recovered, but not his wife Ida?
Luck of the draw. One might be better commenting on the incredibly minute probability that the recovery of two linked victims, like Alexander and Charity Robins, represented.
>Proportionally, why were more 1st class bodies recovered than 3rd?
You cant really say that. You have to eliminate all of the "Unidentified: Probably Third Class/Second Class" guesses from the mix. A middle class Englishman traveling in Third Class, for instance, could be expected to have on his person the same accoutrements that a middle class Englishman traveling in Second Class would. Had Mr. Robins not carried I.D., the presense of over a thousand dollars on his corpse might well have gotten him bumped up to Second or First class. Danbom (sp) comes to mind as well... had he not been identifiable, the contents of his pockets would likely have bumped him up the class structure. Austin Van Billiard.... probably the same deal, had he been recovered.
Enough of third class did NOT conform to the Huddled Masses stereotype to make the educated guess based on clothing and effects difficult. If you show the most common published photos of Bertram Dean and Benjamin Hart to a non-Titanic buff and say "Guess which was second class and which was third" (As I just did) they tend to guess wrong. And, without a doubt, that would have come in to play in 1912 as well.
>We know they were together at the end
We DONT know that they were together at the end. We can assume that they MIGHT have been, but the last unquestionable sighting of them, as Mrs. Straus and Ellen Bird bade farewell to one another, was quite a while before the final plunge. And, the later sightings are vague, in many cases made by people (Abelseth comes to mind) who would not have known the Strauses on sight. And, are all tainted by the curse of Associating Myself However Tenuously With The Heros, aka The Mrs. Shelley And Parrish Syndrome.
We DO know, from hundreds of letters written May 8-10, 1915, of the forces that couples who try to hold on to one another as a ship sinks encounter. (No couples who sank with the Titanic left anyone to write such a letter) They wrote of overwhelming, irresistable, forces which tore chilren and spouses out of their arms, and of being spun around, buffetted, and stuck by rising and sinking debris. The Strauses, had they remained together, would have faced a more exaggerated version of the above, since they were on a ship which was actively breaking up as it sank. They were also pitched into water that was allegedly 28F, so even if the violence of the sinking did not separate them, the physical reaction to being tossed into cold water would have. When the water calmed, they were probably hundreds of feet apart from one another, and by the time the Mackay-Bennett arrived they were probably separated by miles. And, after that, luck of the draw comes into play... there is no reason why Ida SHOULD have been drifting near her husband by that point, and there is nothing at all mysterious about why she was never found.
>Why more Able Bodied Seamen than Ala Carte Restaurant or engineers?
They could well be hiding under the brief descriptions which simply list some of the victims as "Crew. Carried no effects. Buried at sea." And, the a la carte victims, who MAY have been dressed in civilian type clothes, could very well be lurking as unidentified passengers.
