The Titanic was already arguably the most famous shipwreck of all time even before the blockbuster 1997 film—at $1.8 billion the highest-grossing movie ever—spurred a whole Titanic tourism industry. The year after the film’s release, for example, the Halifax, NS-based Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, which houses a Titanic exhibit, “Titanic: the Unsinkable Ship and Halifax” saw attendance jump from 113,000 to 250,000.

Now as we close in on April. 15, 2012, the 100th anniversary of the date the great “unsinkable” ship went down in the North Atlantic with the loss of an estimated 1,500 of her 2,200 passengers, Titanic interest is heating up again. While most of us won’t be on the anniversary cruise that will follow the doomed liner’s exact route, there are other options.

At the Maritime Museum, where you can already check out just what it felt like to lounge in a Titanic deck chair, the Titanic display space has grown three-fold since 1997. Among other centenary plans, the museum will mount an exhibit on cable ships focusing partly on the Halifax-based Mackay-Bennett and Minia, ships chartered by the Titanic’s owners, White Star Line, to recover the bodies.

Of the 209 Titanic corpses that came to Halifax (out of the 328 recovered), 150 are buried in the city: 19 at Mount Oliver Catholic Cemetery, 10 at Baron de Hirsch Jewish Cemetery and 121 at Fairview Lawn Cemetery. At the latter, the grave of victim number 227 reads simply “J. Dawson/ died/ April 15, 1912/ 227”; Titanic movie fans have often left flowers, hearts or poems as a tribute to the fictional hero Jack Dawson. 

http://novascotia.com/en/home/default.aspx