Beattie and his wife Charlotte Reid were born in Kentucky. Beattie’s ancestors were originally from Scotland, settling in the United States as early as 1690.

John and his wife Charlotte were vacationing with their two young children.

One of Beatty’s slaves on the Star who was at the Muggah Hotel when it began to shutter in the storm, saved one of Beatty’s children and Dr. Thomas Bryan Pugh, who was three years old at the time.

The slave had pleaded with Beatty to follow him to higher ground, and when Beatty refused, he pleaded to take at least one child to safety. Beatty adamantly refused demanding his child to be put down, and that’s when the slave fled the hotel. The entire Beatty family perished, but the slave was able to save a child. During this escape, he had also managed to “pluck Pugh’s three-year-old son, Thomas, from the waves.”

Beatty’s son Taylor Beattie was a sugar cane planter, Lafourche Parish Judge, Confederate Army colonel as well as a candidate for governor of Louisiana in 1879 and Congress in 1882. His grandson, Carlton Reid Beattie, was a federal trial judge appointed by President Calvin Coolidge.