Annie was a survivor of the General Slocum fire, and the aunt of it's last survivor Adella Wotherspoon. She and her Husband Frank were saved but their 2 children, Emma and Frank Jr., were killed.
This is her story
"There never was a happier party than we were when we boarded the boat Wednesday morning. We are members of St. Mark's Church and we had looked forward to this outing. The children danced around when I was preparing the lunch the night before and we started early. My husband and myself, and my children, Emma, ten years old, and Frank, seven, and my sister Martha Liebenow met my brother Paul Liebenow and his wife, with their six-month-old baby in her arms, and Helen, six years old, and a baby girl three years old at the dock. We had invited them to go with us to the excursion, and we went on board laughing and talking, the children romping ahead with my sister.
We went to the middle deck, near the forward part of the boat. The sun was shining and the boat glided through the water so smoothly that the children could play around without any danger, and were told to remain within call. The four little ones, my two and my sister-in-law's older children, romped back toward the stern of the boat with my sister.
We were sitting in a circle talking when a puff of black smoke came up the stairway leading to the deck below. It was a big puff of smoke and startled every one.
'Don't mind that, it is the chowder cooking,' someone said, and then we laughed at our fears, but the laughter changed to a cry of horror when a sheet of flame followed the smoke.
I cried for my children, and my sister-in-law, with her baby, ran back to search for her two little ones. The flames kept sweeping up in puffs, each one growing higher and spreading. My husband and my brother had gone to look for the children.
Then we were all separated. I rushed here and there, looking for my children and saying to myself that my husband had found them. The flames were sweeping back as the boat raced on, and it was like the breath of a red-hot furnace.
Get life preservers!' said a man, and we stood up on camp stools and on the benches and reached for the life preservers. Some of them we could not budge, and the others pulled to pieces and spilled the crumbs of corks over our heads.
The heat was blistering and the flames swept along the roof of the deck and scorched our fingers as we tried to snatch down the life preservers. The flames drove those who were standing around me back and over to the side of the boat.
Nobody could live in such heat as that. My face was scorching and my hair caught fire. I went to the side of the boat and swung myself over the side by a rope. Every time my hands, face or body would come in contact with the sides of the vessel it would blister my flesh.
Drop or burn to death!' someone cried to me. I don't know whether I dropped or whether I was pushed off. I found myself struggling against the water, and it was hot.
There were others struggling in the water all around me, and they were pulling each other down. I cried for help and heard a man, who was in the water, tell me to come nearer, that the water was too hot where I was for him to swim in to me. I think I must have caught a rope. I was pulled in shore on North Brother Island and then went back into the water to look for my children.
Before I let go of the rope the vessel was one mass of flames. I knew that the children couldn't live there and thought I might keep them from drowning. I found my husband, with his clothes burned off, looking for the children, and then they took us both to the hospital.
At the hospital I found my brother and his wife. Someone restored to them their six-months-old baby, which had been pulled from the water. My two little children and her two little girls are missing. I pray God that they have all been saved."
Annie would die less than a year after the fire.