A College of San Mateo history professor who traces her love of the past to childhood ghost stories will deliver the keynote at the San Mateo County Historical Association's annual meeting on Saturday, July 25.

Tatiana Irwin, who has taught full time at CSM since 2015, will speak at 1 p.m. inside the San Mateo County History Museum, 2200 Broadway, Redwood City. Her talk, "A House Divided: The Lathrop, Connor, and Mansfield Families in the Civil War," will examine how three families connected to a single Redwood City home navigated political divisions during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

That home is Lora Mundi, the 1863 Steamboat Gothic mansion now standing adjacent to the museum. Benjamin G. Lathrop, San Mateo County's first clerk, recorder and assessor, built it after his wife Mary purchased the lot in 1858. She named the property Lora Mundi, Latin for "beauty spot of the world."

Irwin told the San Mateo Daily Journal she was drawn to the topic by a Currier and Ives print from 1867 titled "The Lincoln Family" that she encountered at Lora Mundi. The mass-produced prints were political statements, she said, and hanging one in your parlor signaled where you stood.

Her keynote will trace the house through three families. After the Lathrops, Union Gen. Patrick Edward Connor's wife Johanna and their children lived there during Reconstruction while Connor served in Utah. Sheriff Joel Mansfield, who had joined the U.S. Navy as a messenger boy, occupied the house later.

A sixth-generation Californian raised in Sunnyvale, Irwin earned her BA and MA in history at San Jose State University while interning at the Campbell Historical Museum. She worked at the California Historical Society before joining the San Mateo Community College District and is pursuing a PhD in history at UC Davis alongside a certificate in digital humanities at UC Berkeley.

"My passion for history started with ghost stories," Irwin said in the July 15 interview. "I began to wonder who these people were before they became ghosts."

Irwin told the Daily Journal that census records from the 1860s and 1870s revealed that many Peninsula households used Native labor, and that Chinese residents, including Ah Pong and Ah Kee, lived at Lora Mundi as domestic servants to the Connor family. Some Chinese residents formed their own households with significant personal property, she said.

The meeting is open to the public. Admission is $6 for adults, $4 for students and seniors. The event is sponsored by the Cypress Lawn Heritage Foundation.

Lora Mundi, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1973, was moved to its current site adjacent to the museum in May 2019. The San Mateo County History Museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. More information is available at historysmc.org or by calling (650) 299-0104.