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This looks like someone has wrongly "Frenchified" the English surname Lathrop. Lathrop doesn't occur in my immediately available surname dictionaries, though I found a reference to it on the web which says it is from a village in Yorkshire called Lowthorpe. "Thorp" and "Throp" (the former Norse, the latter Old English) are common elements in English place names that meant "outlying farmstead", so I would think the theory that Lathrop is from an English place name is likely to be correct.

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"La Thrope" wouldn't be the first example of a name that has been wrongly respelled as if it came from another culture. There are many people in the USA with the surname "O'Dell". This comes from people wrongly interpreting the English surname Odell (which is also from a place name) as if it were an Irish surname, which it is not.

You could try looking at: http://www.thorpedna.org. According to this site, "the Thorpe surname originated in England almost a thousand years ago and most likely has Norse roots". This site says that Thorpe means "dweller at the hamlet" (http://www.geocities.com/lorrainesolo/thorpe.html). I'm not sure how accurate either of these sites are, but it does seem English or Norse to me. Another site says that Thorpe is and Old Norse name meaning "villager" (http://www.nameseekers.co.uk/surname.htm). The La part looks French to me. Perhaps someone placed La in front of the English surname Thorpe? Placing La before a name is common among African Americans. Perhaps, Thorpe was actually used in France. I don't really know. I did find the last name LaThorpe online but I could not find a meaning. It may be a legitimate French last name or it may have a completely different origin.

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Maybe someone from the surnames message board would know:
http://surnames.behindthename.com/bb/list.php?board=sur

This message was edited 12/10/2005, 10:05 PM