Titanic's Last Mystery
The TRUE Story of the Helen Loraine Allison Saga
"America's Anastasia Story"
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Mrs. "Bessie" Allison, Helen Loraine & Baby Hudson "Trevor"
Titanic's Last Mystery: Story SUMMARY:
Since the 100th year anniversary of the S.S. Titanic disaster,
it stands to reason that if there were any more stories to be told...
They would have been.
That is, EXCEPT, for the INCREDIBLE, true story of:
The Helen Loraine Allison and Helen Loraine Kramer Saga:
"America's Anastasia"
CHILD FEARED LOST ON TITANIC REPORTED LIVING IN MICHIGAN
Chicago Tribune / Thursday, September 5, 1940
Montreal, Que., Sept. 4 (AP) A Montreal family was stirred today by the prospect that Lorraine Allison, long believed to have been drowned in the Titanic disaster of 1912, still is alive and residing in Berkley, Mich., as Mrs. Laurence Kramer.
The family is that of Mrs. G. B. Allison, sister-in-law of Hudson J. C. Allison, Montreal financier, who was drowned with his wife when the Titanic went down 28 years ago. Also presumed to have been lost was Lorraine, the Allison’s' 3-year-old daughter. After the sinking, Allison's body was recovered, but those of his wife and child, never were found. Today it was learned Mrs. Kramer had written to the United States Department of Justice claiming to be Lorraine...
In a bizarre twist, Mrs. Kramer stated that on the rescue ship Carpathia, she shared a room with none other than Thomas Andrews, the designer of the Titanic who it was presumed, had perished in the sinking.
She further stated that the director of the White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay (who was later severely criticized for encouraging serious structural problems on the ship as a means of cost efficiency, ordering Captain E.J. Smith, to pick up speed in icy waters, and then entering into a lifeboat when so many others died) George Barbour Allison, middle brother of Hudson Allison and younger brother William Percival Allison, (both of whom stood to gain financially as the caretakers of baby Trevor and Hudson’s fortune), persuaded Andrews to go into hiding along with Loraine by offering him periodic bribery payments as a means to buy his silence.”
The events came to a head when the lawyer representing Mrs. Kramer died during the proceedings, and when asked about the earth-shattering evidence (such as the original of the first letter, letters from Ismay and a diary from Hyde/Andrews) that he had been ready to produce, Mrs. Kramer said that these papers had been lost just recently in a fire.
To add to the cloak and dagger scenario, young Trevor Allison himself had died from suspicious circumstances by ptomaine poisoning in 1929 at the age of eighteen on the eve of his inheritance...so when Mrs. Kramer released her story eleven years later, it was the youngest brother of Hudson J. Allison, William Percival (Percy) and his own family who had since reaped the financial benefits of the inherited estate.
After the suspicious death of the attorney Arthur Flynn, and subsequent fire at his office resulting in crucial lost documents...she reportedly moved to the west coast of the United States and was never heard from again.”
Authors Note - Debrina Woods: That is, until now…
Helen Loraine Kramer was my maternal grandmother. In 1940, she was an adult woman, a successful registered nurse, married with 5 children, living in Royal Oak, a pleasant suburb of Detroit, Michigan.
Who wanted to go across the Detroit River, to Windsor, Ontario-Canada
to shop for custom-made leather shoes for her
daughter Adele, my mother.
She believed herself to be an English woman, married to an American but, the newly instituted U.S. ALIEN REGISTRATION Act, required that an alien registration (GREEN) card was necessary, and a copy of a birth certificate was needed to obtain one. So, she, of course, wrote to the man she thought was her father (Mr. James Hyde) living at the time, in England and he wrote back:
To be disclosed along with substantial additional documentation upon publication of our book: