Word: jefferson
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...After Jefferson's death in 1826, Thomas, Madison and Eston all ended up as freedmen within 25 miles of one another near the town of Chillicothe, Ohio. The brothers were quite fair, being only an eighth black, and Jeffersonian in appearance: tall with reddish hair and gray eyes. But Thomas would become a leader in the black community, founding an African Methodist church. Madison put down roots near a mulatto settlement and also stayed in the black community. "Though we consider it a gift of God, our one enduring question is why Madison chose to stay black when it might...
Eston took a quite different path. For 14 years he lived in Chillicothe, the 1850 Census listing him as mulatto. But by 1860 he and his wife, who was also part black, were living in Wisconsin, his name changed to E.H. Jefferson, the marking on the Census now white. The family would become successful members of the white middle class, winding up on social registries. For descendants like Julia Jefferson Westerinen, 64, of New York City, there would be no idea of the family legacy. For her a brush with blackness was befriending the maid or disciplining her daughter Dorothy...
...acknowledged dual bloodlines, more whites are now embracing such revelations. In January, Jillian Simms, 29, will publish a history of her great-grandmother, who was Vassar's first black graduate but passed most of her life as white. Oddly, Simms too had been told she was related to Thomas Jefferson, and her great-grandmother was named Anita Hemings. (It's unknown whether Anita is related to Sally...
...Hemings descendants have hardly been able to ignore. Diane Redman, a Madison Hemings descendant who lives in Columbus, recalls looking at family pictures from the 1920s, '30s and '40s, with her parents ruefully pointing out relatives who had passed. Indeed, passing is the reason Madison's link to Jefferson cannot be genetically confirmed. Establishing a DNA link requires a continuous male line; but of Madison's three sons, one died childless and the other two disappeared, passing for white...
...white and black Hemings branches are embracing, making plans to hold a joint family reunion. They've been received less warmly by the Monticello Association, the organization of descendants of Jefferson's white daughters. For years they asserted the Hemings children were sired by one of Jefferson's wayward nephews. Now that the DNA tests have eliminated that possibility, they are suggesting there were other male Jeffersons who could have fathered Hemings' children. Jefferson biographer Joseph Ellis discounts this, saying circumstances bolster Madison's link to Jefferson and even call into question the nullification of the Thomas lineage...