Titanic Mapping

Caitlin Dempsey

Major content update:

Minor updates:

April 15th marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean.  Esri has created a map story that looks at the geography, class, and fate of the passengers on the ship.  The online mapping application geocoded the hometowns of all passengers (Titanic’s crew was not included) and identifies them by the type of class they were traveling on (first, second, and third class).

Click on the menu items to see only the places of origins by a specific class and to view a pie chart showing how many passengers survived and died within that class.  Click on a location to see a list of passengers based from that point.  You can delve further into the lives of the Titanic passenger list to see that person’s hometown, boarding location, intended destination, age, class traveled, and whether or not they survived.

The passenger data was mapped from Wikipedia’s list of Titanic passengers.   Visit: Geography, class, and fate: Passengers on the Titanic to see the map story.

A synapsis of the results:

First-class passengers were primarily from affluent European and American cities, while the bulk of third-class travelers were immigrants, many from far-flung locations including Scandinavia, Ireland, Bulgaria, and Lebanon. More than 60% of first-class passengers survived, while only 27% of steerage passengers escaped death.





Map of the Titanic Voyage.  Source: Esri.
Map of the Titanic Voyage. Source: Esri.
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Caitlin Dempsey

Caitlin Dempsey is a geographer, writer, and founder and editor of Geography Realm. She holds bachelor's and master's degrees in Geography from UCLA and a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) from San José State University.

For more than two decades, she has written about geography, maps, geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, satellite imagery, and environmental science. Her work focuses on making geography accessible to a broad audience through articles, tutorials, and educational resources.

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