Harlan Robinson Jessup Jr. ’55

Harlan Robinson Jessup Jr. ’55 died June 15 at his home in Topsham, Maine. He left two sisters, four children, seven grandchildren, and a host of nieces, nephews, and cousins. Born in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, Harlan came to Hanover from Swarthmore High School. After earning his A.B. at the College, Harlan took a dual degree in business administration and engineering from Tuck and Thayer, then joined the U.S. Navy, serving on a destroyer assigned to the 6th Fleet. After four years in the Navy, Harlan and his wife, Shirley, whom he met and married in 1956, settled in upstate New York. They relocated to Newtown, Connecticut, which put Harlan close to the headquarters of General Electric, where he worked in various capacities. Frequent travel and absences from his growing family led Harlan to risk opening a retail store specializing in backpacking, canoeing, cross-country skiing, and snowshoeing. Newtown could not support Jessup Earthways and Harlan returned to GE for a reliable income. In 1990, after retiring from GE, Harlan began working as a genealogist, prompted by research into his family history. Finding a cache of letters and diaries from ancestors in the Shenandoah Valley who had served in the Civil War, Harlan turned these into the 1998 book The Painful News I Have to Write. In addition to private consulting, he served as a contributor to the journal of the Connecticut Ancestry Society from 1996 through 2017.