Word: monticello
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Late one afternoon in May, a large group of people wearing name tags gathered under the shade of a giant tulip poplar tree on the south terrace of Monticello. As the last of the day's tourists were taken by shuttle bus down the winding, single-lane road leading away from the hilltop home, this lingering band nibbled on cheese cubes and sipped red wine as they admired the building's imposing white columns and soaring rotunda. These lingerers were more than tourists, more than guests. They were Jefferson's family. Many breathed a sigh of relief that the 90?...
...good weather wasn't the only thing putting them at ease. This was the first time in six years that the Monticello Association, which comprises some 700 descendants of Jefferson, had held its annual reunion without a horde of reporters and photographers in attendance--or the extended family members who had triggered the controversy. The once obscure association, which administers the graveyard at Monticello, got caught in a media storm in 1998, after a DNA study confirmed to the satisfaction of many that a male member of Jefferson's family had fathered at least one child with a mulatto slave...
...group voted 74 to 6 to deny them full membership. The already strained relations turned decidedly frigid last year when the association restricted the number of Hemings allowed to attend its reunion and attempted to bar them from setting foot inside the graveyard at Monticello. Paulie Abeles, the wife of the association's president at the time, even admitted to having secretly infiltrated an online discussion group that the Hemings had been using, in order to spy on their messages. "It was just an ugly, ugly situation," says Lucian Truscott IV, the Jefferson descendant and association member who originally invited...
...stuffy and very formal," says Shannon Lanier, a Hemings who works as a TV production assistant in New York City and co-authored a book about the family called Jefferson's Children: The Story of One American Family. Instead, last year the Hemings began holding their own reunions at Monticello, complete with a sunrise graveyard service at the recently discovered slave burial site on the estate...
According to the Constitution of the Monticello Association, founded in 1913, one of its missions is "to protect and perpetuate the reputation and fame of Thomas Jefferson." Patrilineal pride runs high. Matthew Mackay-Smith, 71, a retired horse doctor from White Post, Va., who attended this year's reunion wearing a bright red tie imprinted with Jefferson's signature, declares, "I've never shied away from acknowledging and treasuring my connection to the great man." Nat Abeles, a former president of the group, says he proposed to his wife Paulie at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington...