I first learned about Thomas McCormack some time ago through a casual Web search. What has played out since then has been a journey down a historical rabbit hole.

I spent months tracking down information about the former Nashua resident and his harrowing trip across the Atlantic on the doomed RMS Lusitania.

It was blind luck that I reached out to Mario Corrigan, executive librarian at the Kildare Library and Arts Services in Kildare, Ireland, with a question about the sinking of the ship and McCormack’s name.

It was barely 10 minutes after sending the email that my phone at The Telegraph rang. Even through the terrible connection, I could make out Veronica Bagnall-Judge’s Irish trill. I knew I had struck paydirt.

“I’m his granddaughter,” she said simply.

What followed was a series of interviews with Bagnall-Judge that, along with other research, became a two-part series about McCormack’s life in Ireland, Nashua and his heroic actions in the freezing waters of the Atlantic Ocean after a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the ocean liner on May, 7 1915, killing 1,198 passengers and crew.

Though a direct connection is hotly debated, the attack became one reason why America entered Europe’s “Great War” two years later. The dead included 128 Americans, which created a tidal wave of protest and helped shift U.S. public opinion against the Germans.

The two stories will run Wednesday and Thursday in The Telegraph, marking the 100th anniversary of the ship’s sinking.

In several conversations, Bagnall-Judge was happy to tell her grandfather’s story.

“It was almost like another connection to my grandfather, to connect him with America,” she said. “I was quite shocked. What do I do? I was delighted because it kind of made the whole story real.”

McCormack survived the attack, and he raised a family. But the experience took its toll.

“He suffers from depression,” Bagnall-Judge’s mother told her about her grandfather when she was younger.

“When he went into the water, he was wearing a watch. My aunt has that watch,” Bagnall-Judge said. “It’s stopped at 12 past 2.

“My grandfather stayed three years in America. The rest is history.”

The sinking has deeply affected her. During our most recent phone conversation, she recalled being in America after Sept. 11, 2001.

“I remember standing in New York City and thinking, ‘Oh, my god, what it must have been like,” she said.

“In the news, with stories in all these war-torn countries, I often think, with so many people coming in on ships, risking lives … I hear of tragedies on the seas while escaping their country.

“I don’t know. I just think of the confusion must have been in Cork when that word came in (of the sinking). I can’t event put it into words.”

Bagnall-Judge makes sure her own daughter, Courtney Ann, is aware of her family’s connection to history.

“I just tell her my grandfather was a survivor of the Lusitania,” she said.

Others may dismiss it. They may pass aside and make a polite comment.

“To me, it’s huge,”
she said. “Would it not be for him, I would not be here.”

Read more starting in The Telegraph on May 6.

Don Himsel can be reached at 594-6590, dhimsel@nashuatelegraph.com or @Telegraph_DonH.