The Lathrop Family

Research Subject
Written By John Mills

Daniel Stanley Lathrop

In the early 1700’s, a young boy was torn from the bedside of his sick mother in Africa and taken to a slave ship. On the ship, he discovered his father had been captured as well. His name was Primus.

On the slave ship, Primus describes being, “between two low decks, where the grown people could not stand upright.” He spoke of how they were brought on deck to jump for exercise, or to sing, and punished with the cat-of-nine-tails (which is a whip) if they failed to comply. Primus also spoke of how a fatal illness began amongst them, and his father was one of the first to die.

Primus was enslaved to Ebenezer Lathrop of Norwich. In 1752, Primus had a son named Job. During the Revolutionary War, Job served... but when he returned, he was still enslaved. In 1778, Job was sold to Caleb Huntington who freed him.

Nearly a century later, Job's Great Grandson, Daniel Stanley Lathrop, enlisted with the 29th Connecticut Colored Regiment. You may have seen his picture... it's engraved into the stone at the 29th Connecticut Colored Regiment monument in New Haven. His photo is also part of the Randolph Linsly Simnpson African-American Collection at Yale University’s Beinecke Library.

As you may know, I've been working on a project to challenge the inequity the value presented by the lack of Black representation in many photos during the Colonial and Civil War eras. You can read more about that project HERE. I've commissioned an artist (Katiana Jarbath Smith) who will take each individual photo in our collection and create an original painted portrait of each. An exhibition will occur in September 2025.

I reached out to the 2nd Great Granddaughter of Daniel Stanley Lathrop. I explained what we were doing, and she gave me permission to use her ancestors photo in the project.

This will be a $20,000 effort, so we are working to raise funds. Please consider supporting us. You can do so by donating at https://alexbreanne.org/donate .

More to come…

John Mills

Originally from San Diego, John Mills is a technologist by trade, but an equity advocate and independent scholar by passion. The descendant of both southern and northern enslaved, John focuses on unearthing little known people and stories of this country’s history in slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. John presents research through the lens and perspective of a descendant, with intent to inspire understanding and empathy, a means to inspire good, God fearing people, now armed with information, to look into whether they may be unwittingly aligning to biases resulting from the reverberating effects of a past time. John is a member of the Connecticut Freedom Trail and a member of the Webb Deane Stevens Museum Council. John is also working with an international team funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in an effort to deliver transformational impact on digital methods in cultural institutions...a means to decolonize museums. Finally, John is working with the state of Connecticut, business leaders and scholars in Middletown, CT to honor and memorialize a former enslaved individual by the name of Prince Mortimer.

https://alexbreanne.org
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The Jackson/ Reader Family