James E. Purdy · Public domain

Co-owned Macy's with his brother Nathan and served a term in the U.S. House of Representatives, having immigrated from Germany as a child and settled in Georgia, where the family sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War. He died aboard the Titanic in 1912; his wife Ida refused a lifeboat seat to stay with him, and the couple went down together — a story that became one of the disaster's most widely remembered.