Getting Word is the African American history department at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation home. Founded in 1993, Getting Word records and preserves the family histories of the over 610 people enslaved by Jefferson throughout his lifetime.
News & Events

Artist Talk with Jabari Jefferson on “Who Is Edith Hern Fossett?

Q&A: Karice Luck-Brimmer Joins Getting Word as Genealogical Consultant

Black Family History Symposium 2026

Q&A: Filmmaker Lorenzo Dickerson Joins Getting Word as Digital and Oral Historian
Hear the Voices

Ruth Fleming Hunt
1924-2019“I Knew He Was A Bell Ringer”
Ruth Hunt remembers what she heard about her great-grandfather Henry Martin.
“Yes, I knew he was a bell ringer, and I knew that he carried these, oh that’s coming back to me now. I remember Daddy talking about these buckets of coal that he carried to fire, whatever he had to fire. He was very good at ringing the bells without a time piece. I remember Daddy saying that. And I remember him saying he was always there, you know like he wasn’t, he was on time and he wasn’t absent, that sort of thing. And I know my Grandmother Patsy Martin, great‑grandmother, was a very religious person. The two of them seemed to have been religious people from what I recall. And my Grandmother Patsy would not allow anybody to come in her house with a hat on. My father told me about a man who came to her door, I don’t know whether it was insurance or what he was, but she invited him to take his hat off and the way she invited him was like, this was the impression I got, no nonsense kind of thing.”









