Posted on June 2, 2025 by Auriana Woods -
When Mary Kearney was seven, her father, G. Victor Cassells, called her and her siblings into the living room and showed them a small, leather-bound photo album. He said, “I want you children to know who your ancestors are,” and told them that Thomas Jefferson was their third great-grandfather. The treasured album, which came through her grandfather Cyrus Craton Cassells, a Civil War veteran, now belongs to Mrs. Kearney.
She married James A. Kearney and raised six children, writes poetry, and worked as a personnel security specialist for the Department of Defense for seventeen years. An avid historian of the Woodson family, she gave to Monticello an ingenious piece of her father’s woodworking: a chain carved from a single piece of walnut.
Posted on June 2, 2025 by Auriana Woods -
Ellen Wayles Hemings, the youngest child of Madison and Mary (McCoy) Hemings, married her next-door neighbor Andrew Jackson Roberts in 1878. In 1887 they left southern Ohio for Los Angeles, a city in the midst of a land boom. Less than three percent of its population was African American. A. J. Roberts first engaged in the hauling business and later established the first black-owned mortuary in Los Angeles. Both Robertses were active members of the Baptist church.
Ellen and A. J. Roberts’s sons, Frederick Madison Roberts, a member of the California assembly, and William Giles Roberts, joined the family undertaking firm, as did Ivan Saunders, husband of their daughter Myrtle Estelle Roberts. Her grandchildren revered Ellen Hemings Roberts, who they remember as tall, fair-skinned, and blue-eyed, “very aristocratic” and quiet, but with a sharp wit. They never heard her talk about her life in Ohio or her connection to Thomas Jefferson.
Posted on June 2, 2025 by Auriana Woods -
Edith Hern Fossett was the daughter of David Hern, a enslaved carpenter, and Isabel, an enslaved domestic servant. For six years of Jefferson’s presidency, Fossett trained under the French chef at the President’s House in Washington, returning to Monticello in 1809 as chief cook. Her recipes were prized by Jefferson’s family members and Monticello visitors described the meals she prepared as “always choice” and “served in half Virginian, half French style, in good taste and abundance.”
Unlike her husband, Joseph Fossett, Edith and their children were not freed in Jefferson’s will but were sold at the dispersal sale in 1827. Joseph Fossett, with the help of family members, was able to free his wife and five children in 1837, prior to their departure for Ohio; they settled in Cincinnati by 1843. Through the continuous efforts of her husband and other family members, before her death Edith Fossett was able to see most of her children thriving in Ohio. Two of them, William and Peter Fossett, became prominent caterers.
Posted on May 31, 2025 by Auriana Woods -
After retiring from a career in banking, Bill Webb began to investigate his family history. His interest had been sparked by a family Bible record of his ancestor Brown Colbert that he saw as a child in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The research of Bill and his wife, Eva Kobus-Webb, revealed the connection to Monticello and brought to light other Colbert descendants like the Civil War soldier George Edmondson and suffragist Coralie Franklin Cook.
Posted on May 31, 2025 by Auriana Woods -
Twins Robert and Ronald Smith first learned of their connection to the Woodson family after the death of their father, Karl Franklin Smith, an educator, Bible scholar, and bishop of the Church of Christ, Apostolic Faith, in Columbus. In the 1930s Bishop Smith, who they remember as “very quiet in terms of his family history,” had drawn up an ancestry chart based on what he had heard from his mother, but he had never spoken about it. Bishop Smith, who had a far-reaching radio ministry, founded his church and led it for a half century, from a congregation of twenty to over fifteen hundred. Both the bishop’s parents were Methodist ministers. As Robert Smith said about his ancestor Thomas Woodson, “The key has got to be his religion.”
Posted on May 28, 2025 by Auriana Woods -
Frederick Madison Roberts was born in Ohio and grew up in Los Angeles, where his parents moved in 1887. The first black graduate of the city’s high school and a football star at Colorado College, he was a tax assessor, mortician, and college president. For many years he published the weekly Los Angeles New Age and, in 1918, he ran for the California legislature. Elected in a largely white district, he was the first black member of the assembly. He and his wife, Pearl Hinds Roberts, had two daughters.
Roberts was a vigorous advocate of civil rights in the legislature and in his newspaper, spearheading protests and boycotts as discrimination in Los Angeles grew with the arrival of more and more southerners. A loyal Republican at a time when blacks were realigning behind Roosevelt’s Democratic party, he lost his seat in 1934 and waged two unsuccessful campaigns for Congress. In 1952, when slated for an ambassadorship if Eisenhower were elected, his life was cut short by an automobile accident.
Posted on May 28, 2025 by refresh -
Peter Farley Fossett (1815-1901), the son of Joseph Fossett and Edith Hern Fossett was sold, along with his mother and siblings, at the 1827 dispersal sale following Jefferson’s death. When his father, who had been freed in Jefferson’s will, earned enough money to purchase him, Peter’s new owner refused to sell him. Peter Fossett twice tried to run away, without success. Finally, in 1850, he was purchased out of slavery through the efforts of his free family members.
He joined his parents and siblings in Cincinnati, where he became one of the city’s most prominent caterers, a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and a renowned Baptist minister. In his 1898 published recollections, he spoke of his struggles to learn to read and write by stealth and how writing skills allowed him to forge free papers to help fellow slaves to escape. He and his wife, Sarah Mayrant Fossett, were active in a number of civic organizations as well as in the church they founded.
Posted on October 8, 2024 by Auriana Woods -
Robert Hughes was related to two important enslaved families at Monticello, the Hemings family through his father and the Granger family through his mother, Ursula Granger Hughes (1787–post 1847). After Jefferson’s death in 1826, Robert Hughes, his mother, and his siblings remained in slavery at Edgehill, the plantation of Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph; his father was given his freedom unofficially.
Robert Hughes was the Edgehill blacksmith and a Baptist preacher. He and his wife, Sidney Evans, a household servant, and their children became free at the end of the Civil War. Hughes began acquiring land, owning 130 acres at his death. He was the founding minister of the still-flourishing Union Run Baptist Church adjacent to Edgehill. In 1997 Getting Word participants, including Rev. Robert Hughes’s descendant Timothy Hughes witnessed the rediscovery of the founding minister’s grave marker. The marker had been previously located ten years prior by J. Calvin Jefferson, another Hughes descendant. The first word revealed on the stone was “Memory.”
Posted on December 15, 2022 by refresh -
Joyce Harrod grew up in the Washington, DC area, where she still lives. Ms. Harrod is an artist and teaches art to middle school students. Her father, George Harrod, was the first African American to hold various positions in the federal government. In her interview, she expressed herself as very proud of her father and said her grandmother had led “a model life” as a person of strong faith and “an independent woman”: “She continues to be an inspiration to me.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
After being accepted at the University of Virginia, Jacqueline Yurkoski came to Charlottesville with her parents and agreed to answer some questions about how a Sally Hemings descendant of the younger generation feels about her ancestry. She looks forward to a career in medicine.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Phyllis Williams, a social worker, was, in 2006, the first descendant of Edward and Jane Gillette to become known to the Getting Word project, after she contacted the local African American genealogical society. She had been researching her Gillette ancestors without knowing of their connection to Monticello. In the summer of 2007 she came to Charlottesville, with her sister Jeniece Johnson and her cousin Donald Gillette, to attend a gathering of the Monticello community. She continues to explore family history and to draw other relatives into the quest: “The more I learned, the more curious I became and the more curious I became, the more I shared, and the more I shared, then they became curious.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
