Missing Submersible Pilot’s Spouse a Descendant of Famous Titanic Couple

The wife of the pilot manning the submersible that disappeared on Sunday while en route to visit the Titanic shipwreck site is a descendant of two passengers who died aboard the historical vessel when it sank in 1912, according to a New York Times report. 

Wendy Rush, born Wendy Hollings Weil, is the wife of Stockton Rush, the pilot of the Titan submersible and CEO of OceanGate, the company overseeing Sunday’s tour. According to the Times, archival records link Wendy Rush to Isidor Straus and his wife Ida, wealthy passengers aboard the Titanic, as the couple’s great-great-granddaughter. 

Straus was a co-owner of Macy’s department store and a former congressman, born in 1845. He and his wife were first-class passengers and their love story was the inspiration for a scene in James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic.

Survivors aboard the real-life ship said Straus refused a seat on a lifeboat in favor of women and children getting off the sinking ship first. Ida Straus remained with her husband, and survivors said the two stood arm in arm on the deck as it sank.

In Cameron’s Oscar-winning film, an older couple is shot lying together in bed as water rushes beneath them during a montage sequence of the ship sinking while a violin plays.

Ida Straus’s body was not recovered, but Isidor Straus’s was found at sea about two weeks after the wreck, according to archive records from the Times.

One of the couples’ daughter’s, Minnie, was the grandmother of Wendy Rush’s father, Dr. Richard Weil III, according to the Times report. Her father’s father was Richard Weil Jr., who was the president of Macy’s New York and son of Minnie and her husband Dr. Richard Weil, who wed in 1905.

Wendy Rush is the communications director for OceanGate and has participated in three of the company’s expeditions to the site of the Titanic wreck over the last two years, according to her LinkedIn. She is also a board member of the OceanGate Foundation and served as president from 2017 to 2021. She married Stockton Rush in 1986.