The 15th of April marks 111 years since the catastrophic sinking of that most famous of transatlantic liners, the Titanic. With the tragic loss of life of more than 1,500 souls, just 706 were saved. In the churchyard of St Saviour’s, Jersey, there can be found a grave for one of these survivors. At the time of the fatal voyage he had been one of several quartermasters employed as part of the ship’s company. An experienced sailor of many years, after the awful event he never went back to sea, even though he continued in the employ of the White Star Line. At the time that the iceberg hit the Titanic on 15 April 1912, Alfred Olliver was returning to the bridge where he witnessed the orders being given by the officer of the watch. Later, as a survivor, he was able to give evidence in Washington before the US Senate inquiry into the disaster.

Alfred lived another 22 years, dying in 1934 in the island of his birth; he was placed in an unmarked grave in the cemetery extension to St Saviour’s churchyard. His wife Amelia joined him there when she passed away in 1975, though there was still no monument erected to mark their last resting place. That was until in 2012, a hundred years after the sinking of his ship, when a public subscription paid for a memorial stone to be added to their graves. An image of the grave and memorial stone can be discovered by searching the International Headstone Collection that is available on TheGenealogist.

This recordset is an ongoing project where every stone photographed or transcribed earns volunteers credits, which they can spend on subscriptions at TheGenealogist.co.uk or products from S&N GenealogySupplies. There is more about how you can join the volunteers here .

The Headstones Collection is also accessible as a record layer on TheGenealogist’s powerful Map Explorer, which can be used to look into the area surrounding the location of the churchyard or cemetery. Using the different historical and modern georeferenced maps and linked records, researchers can then examine the area to see the neighbourhood’s streets where the deceased ancestor may have lived.

From farm boy to life on the ocean
Alfred John Olliver (2 June 1884 – 18 June 1934) was one of seven quartermasters onboard the RMS Titanic. Based in Southampton at that time, he was originally from the island of Jersey. A look at the 1891 census for the Channel Islands on TheGenealogist allows us to discover that he and his family were living at Green Vales in St Brelade, a western parish of the island. From the census we can see that Alfred’s father, Pierre, was a farmer who originally came from France, while Alfred’s mother, Eliza, was a local Jerseywoman. Ten years later, in 1901, Alfred’s parents had by then moved a few miles to another farm, this time in the parish of St Peter. Alfred, however, was not present in the household by this time.

The young teenager had already left for England where, according to his service records at The National Archives (TNA), he had joined the Royal Navy aged 16. That being the case we would expect to find him in a census for the ship that he had joined. Some researchers online have suggested that he can be found in the 1901 census of the barracks in Alverstoke where a lad with his name appears to be banded together with a number of Royal Marine Privates there. The problem with this hypothesis is that there happened to have been two Alfred J Ollivers and research in the records at The National Archives finds service details for both. The two of them were born in Jersey, but one joined the Royal Marines while the other went into the Navy. The elder of the two had been born in the parish of St Brelade on 16 June 1882, though his parents had subsequently moved to the neighbouring island of Guernsey and this was where he had enlisted as a Royal Marine.

The other, who was more likely to be the Alfred J Olliver who would go on to be a Quartermaster on the Titanic, was born in the parish of St Ouen, Jersey on 2 June 1884. When giving his testimony about the disaster to the US Senate, the year after the sinking, he would say that he had served at sea in both the Royal Navy and the merchant navy. According to the records at Kew he first joined HMS St Vincent from 26 July 1900 as a boy 2nd class, the rank at the time given to 16 to 18-year-old boys on a training ship. This particular old vessel, after its days at sea had come to an end, had then been commissioned as a training ship in 1862 being specifically used for the training of boy sailors. It was moored permanently from 1870 at Haslar within the Alverstoke parish area.

There is, however, a mystery in that while the Royal Marine private is recorded at Forton Barracks (also at Alverstoke), the boy sailor doesn’t immediately appear in the census for 1901 on HMS St Vincent on the night of 31 March 1901. Having not found him from a simple name search of the ship where we had expected him to be, we may wonder if Alfred had been incorrectly listed by the enumerator because of a misunderstanding of his French-origin surname.

To see if this was the case we could use TheGenealogist’s address search of the census collection and so check all those onboard at that time looking for a likely boy sailor with similar details to Alfred. To do this we select address search and enter the ship’s name as the address. Although there are a number of boys whose birthplace had been recorded as Jersey, there is no obvious candidate in these results for Alfred. Next, we may wonder if he was somewhere else on census night and also that his surname had perhaps been misrecorded. A further search successfully finds a 16-year-old Alf J Oliver, instead of Olliver, as a patient in the Royal Navy Hospital at Haslar. This hospitalised boy sailor seems much more likely to have been the future Titanic quartermaster than the boy recorded in the Royal Marines barracks.

Documents at TNA in Kew show us that Alfred became an ordinary seaman on 1 June 1902, as was the custom for boy sailors when they reached 18. The record also shows that he had grown a couple of inches while under training to then stand 5 foot 4 inches high. Other details reveal that the young matelot had auburn hair, blue eyes and a fair complexion plus a tattoo of clasped hands. He served until September 1907 when he was invalided out of the Royal Navy, always having received a Very Good for his character. Also detailed are the list of ships on which he served in the Royal Navy with the St Vincent being his first from 26 July 1900.

Searching forward to 1911 and Alfred, 26, and his new wife Amelia are by then living in Victoria Road, Bitterne, Southampton. Alfred is recorded as a seaman in the merchant service and the census tells us that their marriage had been for less than a year.

Checking the civil BMD records on TheGenealogist confirms that Alfred married Amelia G. Collins in Southampton in the last quarter of 1910. Using the SmartSearch on this site then allows us to look for potential children which finds Alfred J. in 1911, William F. in 1914 and then Hilda P. in 1916, all born in South Stoneham, Hampshire.

Sinking of the RMS Titanic
On the fateful night, Alfred Olliver was one of the quartermasters on duty. He had taken his turn on the ship’s wheel until 10pm, at which time he was relieved from this post by Robert Hichens. Staying on duty as standby quartermaster, this would see him running messages for the officers on the bridge. He had been on one such mission and was returning to the wheelhouse just as the ship hit the iceberg. Alfred reported later that he heard the scraping noise at first, before then seeing it. When he did spot the mass of floating ice he noted it was dark blue and was later able to describe this to the US enquiry. This blue hue would indicate that the iceberg had recently turned over and so what was above the sea was still full of water. This could explain why the lookouts on the ship did not see it until it was too late.

Alfred was ordered to go and find the ship’s carpenter and ask him to measure the level of the water. Finding the carpenter already doing this, Alfred’s next order was to take a message to the chief engineer down in the engine room. Then he delivered a message from the chief engineer to the captain, Edward Smith. Ordered by the chief officer to tell the boatswain to prepare the Titanic’s lifeboats, Alfred was then detailed to enter a lifeboat with Third Officer Herbert Pitman and five other crew. They embarked about 35 passengers, mostly women and children, into their boat and Alfred ensured that the plug was in the lifeboat so that it would not get swamped and then capsize.

TheGenealogist has a number of records that can be used by researchers interested in the Titanic. These include passenger lists and a passenger list database, The Deathless Story of the Titanic and The Sinking of the Titanic, both later resources found in the site’s Reference Books collection. Alfred appears listed in the section for quartermasters under officers and crew of the ship in the first book. From this we can see his address was given as Anderson’s Road and by searching for this using the Map Explorer we see that it is but a stone’s throw away from Southampton docks.

A question arises as to why Alfred and Amelia ended up in St Saviour’s cemetery churchyard. Traditionally in Jersey, much like in England and Wales, parishioners had a right to be buried in their parish churchyard. This being the case it was likely that Alfred was resident in this parish, albeit on the other side of the island from where he had grown up. A search for their son, A.J. Olliver, after 1932 finds him in the Jersey Almanach for 1940, one of the records on TheGenealogist for the island. This residential directory lists A.J. Olliver Jr living at Blanver, Langley Avenue, St Saviour, Jersey and so this points to a link to this parish which may have extended to his parents in the previous decade. Of course 1940 was the year that saw the Channel Islands occupied by Nazi German forces as the islands fell and became the only part of the British Isles to be occupied by the Germans. It would appear, from research in the Jersey Archive, that Alfred Olliver Jr, his wife and his daughter were included in the 6,000 evacuees from Jersey to England who left just before the occupying forces arrived. They are then included in records of former islanders who applied to return after the war was over.

This article has used various records including those online at TheGenealogist, as well as those in The National Archives in Kew and in Jersey to trace the young lad from a farm who joined up as a boy sailor. We have been able to discover him in the Royal Naval Hospital in the 1901 census and so ruling him out from being the Royal Marine of the same name. An entry in a list of the crew of the Titanic revealed his address in Southampton at the time of the fateful voyage and the Headstone collection allowed us to see the fitting headstone that now adorns what had been, for years, an unmarked plot where he and his wife had been laid to rest. { See also: encyclopedia-titanica.org