The wife of the CEO of the missing Titanic tourist submarine is descended from a wealthy New York couple who drowned on the Titanic in 1912.
Wendy Rush is married to Stockton Rush, one of the five men trapped in Titan after it vanished on Sunday during a trip to visit the historic wreckage.
Her great-great-grandparents, Isidor and Ida Straus, died in the historic disaster – with Isidor being a co-founder of the Macy’s department store.
They were also immortalized in James Cameron’s 1997 movie ‘Titanic’, where they are shown in an iconic scene, fictionally embracing on their bed as water rushed onto the ship.
The revelation comes as crews continued to search a remote area of the Atlantic ocean for the missing sub containing her husband, a French explorer, an English billionaire, a Pakistani billionaire and his son.
Wendy Rush, born Wendy Hollings Weil, married engineer and entrepreneur Stockton Rush in 1986. She is descended from Isidor and Ida Straus’s daughter Minnie, who married Dr. Richard Weil in 1905.
Their son, Richard Weil Jr., later served as president of Macy’s New York, and his son, Dr. Richard Weil III, is Wendy Rush’s father, The New York Times reported.
Isidor and Ida were two of the wealthiest people onboard the Titanic when it sank to the bottom of the ocean during its maiden voyage – from Southampton, England to New York City – after striking an iceberg.
The couple had in real life visited their native Germany, and were travelling back to the United States on the Titanic with Ida’s recently-appointed maid, Ellen Bird, and Isidor’s manservant, John Farthing.
The couple typically only journeyed on German vessels, but were taken in by the allure of a trip on the brand new Titanic and the luxury offered onboard.
This decision would lead to a tragic end to their love story, but not before the couple displayed one final act of compassion.
As the Titanic began to sink, Isidor and Ida were offered seats on a lifeboat – her as a woman, and him as a well-known former congressman and co-owner of Macy’s department store – giving them priority over other passengers.
But Isidor refused, saying he would not go until all the women and children had gone, and Ida then refused to go without her husband of 40 years.
This moment, witnessed by other passengers, was also depicted in a deleted scene from Cameron’s ‘Titanic’.
Ida gave her mink coat to her maid, Ellen Bird, to keep her warm as she sailed away on the lifeboat.
According to eyewitness accounts, the pair were seen embracing on the deck of the ocean liner as it went down.
According to an archived copy of the New York Times published on May 13, 1912, a memorial for the couple was held in New York City’s Carnegie Hall.
The memorial was ‘impressive and reverential’, the newspaper wrote at the time, reporting that the venue was too small to contain all the mourners who wanted to attend, resulting in the crowd spilling out onto the streets outside.
A number of notable figures at the time were in attendance, including the then-city Mayor William Jay Gaynor and industrialist Andrew Carnegie.
Today, a memorial statue to the couple sits at the intersection of Broadway and West End Avenue at W. 106th Street in Manhattan.
It depicts a young woman lying on her side on what appears to be a divan, one leg draped over the side.
The couple’s great-grandson Paul A. Kurzman spoke about his ancestors in 2017.
‘My great-grandmother Ida stepped into the lifeboat expecting that her husband would follow,’ the couple’s great-grandson Paul A. Kurzman told NBC’s The Today Show in 2017.
‘When he didn’t follow, she was very concerned and the ship’s officer in charge of lowering that particular lifeboat said, “Well, Mr. Straus, you’re an elderly man…and we all know who you are….Of course you can enter the lifeboat with your wife.
‘And, my great-grandfather said, “No. Until I see that every woman and child on board this ship is in a lifeboat, I will not enter into a lifeboat myself,”‘ he said.
Isidor’s body was found at sea roughly two weeks after the disaster, archives show. Ida’s body has never been recovered.
A locket was recovered from Isidor’s body, which Kurzman says contained two photographs: ‘One of the photographs was of their eldest son, Jesse, and the other was of their eldest daughter, and that, of course, was Sara, my grandmother.’
Wendy Rush has visited the Titanic wreckage three times with her husband’s company in the last two years, and works as OceanGate’s communications director.
Stockton Rush, 61, founded OceanGate in 2009.
The Seattle-born, Princeton-educated aeronautical engineer worked on fighter jets and initially hoped to go to Mars before switching his attention to the sea.
