On the Campaign Trail, Reciting Family History They are certainly a luckless bunch, all those would-be mayors not named Quinn. How improvident of them not to have had a grandparent who booked passage on the Titanic, thereby giving them an interesting legacy of their own for all those reflections on the great ship's final moments, a century ago on Sunday. It recalls the lament of a colleague, John Tierney, about the utter lack of poverty that he endured growing up. He missed out on the good fortune of the McCourt clan, born to destitution in Ireland, their background so wretched that the gifted Frank McCourt turned it into one of the best-selling memoirs of all time, "Angela's Ashes." Success of that sort, Mr. Tierney wrote years ago, was "enough to make you curse every nonmiserable moment of your own childhood." Now we have Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker. Her grandmother, Ellen Shine Callaghan of County Cork, booked passage on the Titanic, steerage class. That she survived is of itself a marvel. The odds, as ever, were heavily stacked against those in steerage. This was quite a tale, about pluck as much as luck, and not a bad story line to be invoked by a granddaughter who hopes to become New York's first female and first gay mayor. (It is a journalistic convention to describe Ms. Quinn as the first openly gay Council speaker. The adverb "openly" carries a faint hint that, for all we know, some of her predecessors were gay but remained closeted. We'll set it aside.) Politicians routinely use their family history as a credential. In the 2005 Democratic primary for mayor, candidates practically tripped over one another trying to impress voters with the humbleness of their backgrounds. One talked about how genuinely middle-class he was, with a mother who taught school in Brooklyn. Another cited his grandmother's toil in the kitchen of the Waldorf-Astoria. Yet another recalled growing up black in segregated Alabama. It almost made me wonder at the time if I should declare my own candidacy. After all, my parents were immigrants. My father began life in this country driving a horse-drawn wagon for a laundry in East Harlem. That modest history, I figured, would have been good for a few votes. I scrapped the idea of running, though, when I couldn't come up with an explanation for why my father's laundry wagon qualified me to be mayor. But no ambitious politicians worth their salt are about to let so sensible a consideration deter them from summoning family ghosts as proof of authenticity. And the Titanic remembrances have given Ms. Quinn a big jump on her potential rivals. Should the city comptroller, John C. Liu, shake off questions about his campaign finances and run for mayor, he has an immigrant story himself to tell. In fact, he has told it, more than once. In the 2009 comptroller's race, Mr. Liu recounted how as a boy he worked alongside his mother in a garment district sweatshop. He kept mentioning this even after his mother told The Daily News that she never worked in a factory but, rather, did piecework at home. Perhaps a rewrite is in order. What others could use - this means you Bill de Blasio, Scott Stringer, William C. Thompson Jr., or whoever else may jump into the race - is a good disaster to make it possible to go one on one against Ms. Quinn in this arena. Folks, you need to look deep into your family histories. For all you know, you had a relative on the Andrea Doria, which sank in 1956 after colliding with another ship in waters off Nantucket. Maybe you had kin on the Lusitania or the similarly ill-fated Hindenburg. Better yet, perhaps your grandfather was in the Malbone Street horror, a 1918 derailment in Brooklyn that was the worst subway disaster in New York history, with nearly 100 people killed. You could use it to underline your abiding concern for mass transit. You need to do serious digging right away. Few of us can be as blessed as the McCourts or Ms. Quinn, and have calamity simply fall into our laps.