My name is Tom Lathrop. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. I worked for most of my career as a software engineer, including 23 years at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York. I retired in 2013.
My interest in family history was triggered about 1980 when I visited my mother’s house for Thanksgiving. At that time, my mother, Isabel Lathrop, had been spending a lot of time in New Haven, Connecticut cleaning out a condominium which had been owned by her mother, Isabel Grier (who we called Dowie). My mother had brought home some materials related to our family history from Dowie’s condo. Dowie had been very interested in her family history. My mother, my sister, and I began talking about some of the family stories that Dowie had told. We remembered that Dowie had said that we had family connections to several notable historical people: Kilaen Van Rensselaer, Aaron Burr, Stephen Decatur, and Stephen Crane (the author of The Red Badge of Courage, a novel about a Union soldier in the Civil War).
After returning to my home in Rochester, NY, I started researching the four people who Dowie had talked about. That led me to the genealogy room at the Rochester Public Library. There I found a Halsey family genealogy which included Dowie and gave her ancestry back to Thomas Halsey, an early settler of Southampton, Long Island. I also found a Crane family genealogy (published in 1900) which included Fanny Crane Grier, the mother of Dowie’s husband Edgar. It had Fanny’s ancestry back to Stephen Crane, an early settler of Elizabeth, New Jersey, about 1665. Finding those genealogies and several more got my genealogical research off to a great start. I later did research at many other libraries. More recently, I have done a great deal of research on Ancestry.com and other online sources.
After I retired, I joined the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I take courses there, which are taught by Osher members. My interest in genealogy led me to develop and teach two courses in colonial American history. One was on New Netherland and colonial New York, and the other was on New England in the colonial era. Because I don’t have a degree in history, I had to do a lot of reading and research to prepare those courses. Doing that gave me a much better understanding of the historical context in which my ancestors lived.