Miss Ūwjīnīyā al-B'aqlīnī 1 (aka Eugenie Baclini) around 1908 2 was born in Al Shwayr, Syria, then part of the Ottoman Empire and now part of modern-day Lebanon.
She was the daughter of Sulaymān Dāwūd al-B'aqlīnī (b. 1878), a pharmacist, and Laţīfah al-Haj Qurbān (b. 1888). By April 1912 she had two sisters, Marie (b. 1906) and Hilānah (b. 1909).
In late 1908 Ūwjīnīyā 's father left their village with a neighbour, Najīb Qiyamah, fleeing potential religious persecution and with the intention of establishing his own pharmacy in New York. Instead, he spent time in San Cristóbal, Venezuela before entering the USA on 7 June 1910. By 1912 he had established a dry goods business and saved enough money to send back to bring his wife and daughters across the Atlantic.
Ūwjīnīyā was travelling to her father at 217 Washington Street, Brooklyn, New York. Also travelling with them was her teenage neighbour Adāl Najīb Qiyāmah, who her mother was chaperoning to her father Najīb Qiyamah. Their journey started from their village and went to Beirut from where they sailed to Marseille, after which they would journey to Cherbourg. Before boarding at Cherbourg it was discovered that her sister Mārīyā had conjunctivitis, preventing their further travel on grounds of contagion and so their journey was delayed until they could join the next available ship, the Titanic. They boarded as third-class passengers with ticket number 2666 which cost £19, 5s, 2d.
On the night of the sinking Mrs Baclini was somehow able to navigate her way, with three young children and Adāl Najīb Qiyāmah in tow, to the upper decks where the five were able to enter a lifeboat and escape. The al-B'aqlīnī family is a rare example of a larger third class family group surviving intact.
In America, Ūwjīnīyā became Eugenie and settled with her family in their new home. However, she did not get to grow up in her new homeland and Eugenie died from meningitis in the Bellevue Hospital on 30 August 1912, becoming the second of the 712 Titanic survivors to die (she was preceded in death by Mariyam Nakid, a fellow Lebanese passenger). She was buried in a pauper's section (Section 39, Range 24, Plot D14) of Calvary Cemetery in Queens, New York in an unmarked plot.
Her parents welcomed two more children after her death, David and Isabel. The family remained in Brooklyn.
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