Mr. Stockton Rush is the founder and CEO of OceanGate Ocean Exploration Company, owner of the Titan submersible that went missing in the North Atlantic on June 18 while exploring the wreck of the Titanic.

Mr. Rush was the helmsman of the Titan. According to The New York Times on June 22, Mr. Rush is a descendant of Mr. Benjamin Rush and Mr. Richard Stockton, two of the signers of the 1776 Declaration of Independence of the United States.

Stockton Rush graduated from Princeton University with a degree in aerospace engineering in 1984. He founded OceanGate in Everett, Washington, in 2009. In an interview aired on CBS last year, Rush said his childhood dream was to become an astronaut and, after graduating, to become a fighter pilot.

His wife, Wendy Rush, is a descendant of Isidor and Ida Straus, two of the richest people on the Titanic. Isidor Straus was born in 1845 and was a co-owner of the retail chain Macy's.

Survivors of the Titanic disaster reported seeing Isidor refusing to get into a lifeboat while many women and children were on board the Titanic waiting to be rescued. Ida refused to leave her husband and the two were seen holding hands on the deck as the ship sank. Isidor's body was found at sea two weeks after the Titanic sank in 1912. Ida's body was never found.

SCREENSHOT THE NEW YORK TIMES

The image of Mr. and Mrs. Straus was also recreated by director James Cameron in the 1997 blockbuster Titanic , in which an elderly couple cuddled together in bed while water slowly rose in the ship's cabin.

According to The New York Times , Wendy Rush called the Strauss her great-grandparents. Specifically, Minnie, one of the daughters of Isidor and Ida Straus, married Richard Weil in 1905 and gave birth to a son named Richard Weil Jr., who was president of Macy's New York. Richard Weil Jr.'s son, Richard Weil III, was Rush's father.

Rush married Stockton Rush in 1986. She participated in three Titanic expeditions and is the communications director for OceanGate, according to her LinkedIn page.