Primary Sources During The Disaster Of The Titanic

Primary sources are any original documents or artifacts from a period in time. These sources are often used to help figure out things about the people and time period that it is from. The Fatality Reports of those who died during the disaster of the Titanic are primary sources that give very useful insight into what life was like during the early 1900s. In order to determine these things, we must first analyze the source. This includes finding out who wrote the source, when the source was written and why they wrote it.
One often tries to determine who the author is so that a source can be deemed credible or not. Because this source is death records, it does not really have an “author”; in the traditional sense of the word. So for these records, one would have to look at the people that completed and authorized the source. In this case, the Medical Examiner for the City of Halifax conducted each body inspection and Frederick F. Mathers, the Deputy Provincial Secretary of Halifax at the time, signed each report. This makes these reports substantially credible. …show more content…
So these reports were not conducted until a few days after the boat had actually sunk. That is still an adequate amount of time for a person’s body to be inspected and recorded properly. This also gives an understanding of how slow communication was between people. Today, if a ship were to crash in the middle of the ocean, it would only be a matter of minutes for someone on land to find out; and probably only a few hours for rescue teams to get to the boat. But because communication was so limited during the early 1900s, it took days for people to get out to the