Local Titanic expert gains large following telling tales of passengers on social media

Kaylee Jukich-Fish can’t remember what sparked her interest in the Titanic, the passenger liner that slipped into the North Atlantic after hitting an iceberg more than a century ago, but she does recall leaving questions about the sinking around her Kalispell home as a child.

“What I used to do was take sticky notes and write questions on them and post them around the house for my dad to answer, like why didn’t Titanic have enough lifeboats,” she said.

For a while, he would do a bit of research and get back to her. But eventually, “he couldn’t answer the questions anymore so he started getting me books instead,” she said with a laugh.

Although wrapping up a degree in criminal justice from the University of Las Vegas — she plans on going to law school — Jukich-Fish has turned her lifelong fascination with the doomed ship into a thriving social media following.

Furloughed during the pandemic, she began posting short videos to TikTok exploring the people and personalities aboard the Titanic when it sank early in the morning of April 15, 1912. These days, her TikTok account — her handle is kjfish — boasts nearly 136,000 followers. Her videos have been watched tens and hundreds of thousands of times, some even cracking a million views.

As the 110th anniversary of the sinking approached, Jukich-Fish upped her production tempo, aiming to post a short profile of a passenger each day during April. The effort landed her in an article in Newsweek. Her work sharing stories from the ship also earned her a spot on “Mysteries From the Grave: Titanic,” a documentary released last month on the ad-supported free streaming service Tubi.

Jukich-Fish credits the Titanic exhibition at the Luxor in Las Vegas with propelling her interest in the vessel. She remembers it as her first stop upon arriving in the city and recalled giving her name and number to an employee. A few weeks later, she was on her way to becoming an artifact specialist and docent at the exhibition.

“It's definitely something that started earlier, but being able to work in the exhibit, having a job where my job was to research, it intensified that interest,” she said.

FOR HER social media project, Jukich-Fish starts with a collection of replica boarding passes. Drawing one at random, she fleshes out the passenger’s life details and experiences aboard the ship through research. Usually, that begins with the Encyclopedia Titanica, but Jukich-Fish pulls from other reference materials and newspaper clippings. She recommended “The Sinking of the Titanic,” a book edited and abridged by Bruce M. Caplan, in particular.

She likened putting that all together in a short video akin to a puzzle. Accounts occasionally differ and even survivors’ stories changed throughout the course of their lives. Jukich-Fish pointed to passenger Mary Davis as one example.

“Her initial report was very different from the report she gave in an interview decades later,” she said. “The two different stories she told — it’s impossible for both of them to happen.”

That sort of contradiction dovetails with Jukich-Fish’s college coursework.

“It’s not that they’re lying, but in a traumatic situation like that you’re going to remember bits and pieces,” she said. “Drawing from criminal justice studies, [stories] tend to change as the years and years go by. … They’re not lying, they’re just remembering things differently.”

IT’S THE life-and-death decisions, played out among 2,200 passengers and crew over several hours across the 883-foot ship that Jukich-Fish believes makes the sinking the constant source of intense interest.

“It really became a play for humanity,” she said. “You start to see the best parts of people that came out in this tragedy. You see a lot of self sacrifice, people saving other people. It’s the goodness that comes out of tragedy that attracts me to Titanic. You had almost three hours to decide: Are you going to get into the lifeboat or give it up?”

“There’s something about it that is very Shakespearian,” she added.

Now that the anniversary of the sinking has passed for another year, Jukich-Fish is looking forward to exploring other heroes among the ship’s crew: the wireless operators.

Days before the Titanic struck that fateful iceberg, the vessel’s Marconi machine broke down, she said. The devices, new at the time, allowed ships to communicate several hundred miles during the day — and even farther at night. And since operators were only paid while sending messages, they were determined to get it up and running again, she said.

“Had they not stayed up all night to fix it, Titanic wouldn’t have been able to send any SOS at all,” Jukich-Fish said.

As if that wasn’t enough, the operators broadcast distress calls as the ship slid into the icy water.

“During the sinking, they stayed in the wireless room even after they had been relieved,” she said.

With her time at the University of Las Vegas wrapping up, Jukich-Fish plans to return to Kalispell. And while she expects to pursue a career in criminal justice, she doesn’t plan on shelving her passion for Titanic (she’s also written a novella, “Hold Me Up in Might Waters,” set aboard the sinking ship, available on Amazon). She recently attended an exposition on the topic in Orlando and is in talks to help the event with their social media.

“Titanic is very drawn out, it created a perfect atmosphere for the ‘Titanic' movie and all of these stories that come out,” she said. “It’s like a domino effect: Everything that could have went wrong, went wrong.”

News Editor Derrick Perkins can be reached at 758-4430 or dperkins@dailyinterlake.com.