So often when I’m working on genealogy, I come across a person who had a story I long to know. Jessie Lathrop, my third-great aunt, was one of those people. I don’t know much about her, but what I do know is tragic. Jessie was born on November 2, 1864, the first child of Andrew Mercer Lathrop and Lucy Anna Sanders.

Jessie Lathrop's birth recorded in the family Bible
You could say that Andrew’s life was a series of tragedies. His father died before he was born. He was something of an outsider in southern Louisiana because his father was descended from an old Colonial family, so he wasn’t French or Cajun. He was also Protestant in a region so Catholic that when he died, he was buried just outside the fence of the cemetery. He had only been married for three years to his first wife, Susan F. Rider, when she died of complications from childbirth at age 28. The daughter she bore, Ada, died the following year. (Click here to read a sweet, cheerful letter from Susan to Andrew the day before she gave birth to Ada)

Andrew & Lucy Lathrop, Jessie’s parents
Andrew didn’t marry again for ten years. When he did, it was to Lucy Anna Sanders, a woman 25 years his junior. Which brings us back to Jessie. On December 21, 1880, the New Orleans Times-Picayune included this brief news item:
The Thibodaux Sentinel publishes a report of the suicide of Miss Lathrop, niece of Louis Sanders . . . at Bayou Lafourche. She had made two previous attempts at self-destruction, and finally succeeded in her mad purpose by swallowing a dose of arsenic.
Jessie Lathrop killed herself on November 16, 1880, two weeks after her sixteenth birthday. After two previous attempts. What made her so desperate to die? Family lore (never known for being reliable) says that her uncle, Lewis Sanders, had sexually abused her. Family guesswork (even less reliable) suggests that he got her pregnant. She was living with Lewis and his three children on the 1880 census; his wife had died in 1875, and it seems Jessie was keeping house for her uncle and taking care of her young cousins. Lewis married his second wife in December of 1880, a month after Jessie’s death. Did Lewis take advantage of his niece? The fact is, we’ll never know.

Jessie's death recorded in the family Bible; the birth of her little brother, my great-great-grandfather, Woodford Lathrop, was recorded just above.
We do have a letter that Lewis wrote to Andrew in January of 1881, wrapping up some last, small details of Jessie’s short life:
I rec your Ecknolagement of the Barl I shiped to you, things belonging to Jessie they ar just as She left them […] I had the clothes washed those cut & torn Dresses ar the clothes that was taken off of her after her deth
Jessie had a sad story to tell. I can’t ever know exactly what that story was, but thanks to genealogy, at least I can know that she lived and that she had a story.
In Memory of Jessie Lathrop
1864-1880
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