An Unsolved Family Mystery Haunted Me for Years — So I Wrote a Novel to Help Solve It For Myself (Exclusive Essay)

“I’m a ruminator, and I worry that disaster is in my DNA,” writes ‘The Responsible Party’ author Claire Carusillo

I’ve spent most of my life wondering what happened to my great-great grandmother Fanny Mounsey. 

On May 28, 1914, Fanny traveled to a port in Quebec from her home in Chicago to board a Liverpool-bound ship, the RMS Empress of Ireland, with the intent of visiting family in Cumberland. A day after setting sail, the Empress collided with a Norwegian coal-freighter in a narrow set of manmade locks known as the St. Lawrence Seaway. Fanny’s ship went down in 14 minutes, and presumably, so did she. My ancestors back home mourned their lost matriarch, but eventually, life sculled on without her.

Her deadly trouble with water has made me avoidant of pleasure cruises and amusement park flume rides, and a case of mistaken identity that briefly brought her back to life has made a hyper-vigilant identification-carrier. I’m a ruminator, and I worry that disaster is in my DNA.

Because while Fanny’s last moments alive were an ice-cold tragedy, her last gasps for air aren’t what haunted me. It was the next part of the legend — Fanny’s unexpected resurfacing — that always kept me awake.

Eleven months after the accident, Fanny’s family in Chicago received a curious telegram. Someone in Liverpool was purporting that Fanny was alive. Probably. At the very least, a woman who feared the sea had washed up in an almshouse, and she was mumbling some syllables that sounded a little bit like “Fanny Mounsey.” 

The Mounseys alerted the Chicago Tribune before crossing the ocean to retrieve their long-lost ma. On April 15, 1915, an article entitled WIFE MOURNED AS SEA VICTIM FOUND ABROAD? ran in the Trib, referring to Fanny’s widower and my great-great-grandfather, William Mounsey.

The article’s subhead:

Husband Sails to Seek Possible Empress of Ireland Survivor.

The sub-subhead:

IN POORHOUSE, DAZED.

Intriguing. Fairly offensive. I’m a self-taught sometimes-journalist who tends to dwell on the perverse in every story, and even I would’ve chosen different language.

The article reads:

In an almshouse in Liverpool, England is a gray-haired ghost of a woman who is haunted by an abiding fear of the water — particularly water in rivers and bays and oceans. 

She is a woman, moreover, with two identities. On the books of the institution when she was entered and registered months ago, her name was set down as Kate Fitzpatrick. In her own disturbed mind most of the time she is Kate Fitzpatrick, without kin, without friends, without memory. 

But once or twice the shadows have lifted from the woman’s mind, and then she has mumbled a name other than the one on the almshouse register. 

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The article goes on to describe William’s decision to travel to Liverpool to retrieve her. As this was 1915, the reporter made no mention of his daughter Sarah, who accompanied her father on the trip with her husband.

It is the Liverpool almshouse that is his objective, and it is the Kate Fitzpatrick of the water fear he is going to see — for the other name which attendants have heard Kate Fitzpatrick mention is Fannie Mounsey. 

A piece published in another Chicago newspaper in 1915 seems to confirm that William had seen a photo of Kate Fitzgerald and became convinced she was his missing wife. The family traveled from Chicago to New York to board the RMS Lusitania on May 1, 1915. As you may have heard, it sank. Of my three family members on that second ship, only Sarah survived. 

Ten years ago, I decided to write a book inspired by Fanny and Sarah’s odysseys told from a contemporary perspective. My account of the Mounsey women was always going to be fictional; I’d heard Fanny’s story so many times as a child that it had been elevated to mythical status in my family.

Halfway into writing the book that would become The Responsible Party, I connected with a distant cousin, Todd, who shared with me a folder of ancient articles with me, a treasure trove of old-timey writing and first-person reportage. By that point, I’d grown obsessed with  the Fanny Mounsey/Kate Fitzgerald saga and was sure that wielding the cold, hard facts could allow me to make some sense of who Kate Fitzgerald was and what she had to do with Fanny Mounsey.

I haven’t been able to find a follow-up to the Tribune article on the Mounseys in the immediate aftermath of the sinking, but the Kenosha News did publish a letter Sarah wrote to relatives in Chicago on May 27, 1915 after she survived the wreck and made it to the poorhouse in Liverpool where her mother was allegedly living. 

I went to see that lady at Ormeshirk (near Liverpool) but [she] is nothing like mamma, never has been. She is a short, chubby woman. Her hands are black with big freckles, and her face is round. I am so sorry we didn’t wait until we heard more about it, as Dr. Robeg told us to.

That account left me with more questions than answers, not the least of which is Who the hell is this soothsaying Dr. Robeg? 

Sarah made it back over the Atlantic safely, albeit without her mother (of course, we don’t know how) or Kate Fitzgerald, settled back down in Chicago, and eventually married her German claims inspector. I can’t verify this either, but my family also believes that Sarah survived the Eastland disaster, a boat capsizing in the Chicago River that killed nearly 850 people. Stranger than fiction and too small of a footnote in her remarkable life to even make it into my book. 

Everywhere I looked, the facts spun out. At one turn, I met via Zoom with a theater director in England who wrote a musical from Kate Fitzgerald’s perspective. He’d come to a different conclusion than I had about what happened between the two women. Neither of us was wrong. At the heart of this myth is an adventure on the high seas, not a detective novel. 

That’s when I realized that getting to the oomph of Sarah and Fanny’s life would honor their unbelievable narrative better than the exact truth. So I did what any old salt with a sea shanty to share would: I spun my yarn out into the most complex of braids. My worry and wakefulness ebbed, and ideas flowed freely. For the first time in forever, when I started having fun with the story, ideating all the ways that Fanny and Kate could have met and colluded, how Sarah could have kick-pushed her way into the lifeboat, or how my narrator’s mother might have exaggerated a certain narrative to further her own agenda.

In my book, Sarah gets to the almshouse and takes the woman home, even if she’s unsure if she’s her mother Fanny or Kate Fitzgerald. She’d made such a long trip and weathered so many storms, and she couldn’t come home empty-handed. I like to think it’s what I would have done. Anything for a good story.

The Responsible Party will hit shelves on Aug. 11 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

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