The last link to the most famous ocean tragedy has passed from this life into the next.

Millvina Dean, 97, the youngest passenger on the Titanic and the last living link to history's most famous sunken ship, died May 31 at a nursing home in Hampshire, England, a friend told the BBC. No cause of death was given.

Born Elizabeth Gladys Dean in London on Feb. 12, 1912, she was about 8 weeks old when the luxury liner set sail. She was on the ship because her parents, Bertram and Georgetta Dean, had sold their London pub in hopes of beginning a new life in America. Their plan was to open a tobacco shop in Wichita, where they had family and friends.

The Deans and their two children were originally booked on another White Star liner, but a coal strike prompted a transfer to the Titanic, on its maiden voyage. They boarded at Southampton as third-class passengers and set sail April 10, 1912.

On the night of April 14, while sailing south of Newfoundland's Grand Banks, the elder Dean felt the iceberg's fatal gouge into the ship's hull. Leaving the cabin to investigate, he soon returned to shepherd his wife and their sleeping children up on deck. Millvina and her mother, who had lost track of her 2-year-old son in the panic and chaos, were seated in Lifeboat 10 and were among the first steerage passengers to escape the sinking liner. Millvina was so tiny that she had to be lifted into the lifeboat in a postal sack.

After their boat drifted in the water for some time, they were rescued and taken aboard the Carpathia, a ship that had answered the Titanic's distress call.

Millvina's brother was already aboard the Carpathia. The ship arrived safely in New York on April 18.

One life saw so much change in the course of nearly a century, from the age of ocean liners to the age of space travel. It is my hope that she is, at last, reunited with the father she lost in that terrible tragedy which marked the beginning of her life, and the family that she lost since.