Donald Gillette, a retired millwright and union official, came to Charlottesville in 2007 with his wife, Margaret, and his cousins Phyllis Williams and Jeniece Johnson. Phyllis Williams had, in 2006, been the first descendant of Edward and Jane Gillette to make contact with the Getting Word project. She had been researching her Gillette ancestors without knowing of their connection to Monticello. Don Gillette’s father, Harry Gillette, had left Albemarle County after the death of his father Moses Gillette. He never spoke about his Virginia past, although father and son did at one time visit the family graveyard northwest of Charlottesville.
Families
Margaret Gillette
Moses Gillette
Moses Gillette was the son of Moses Gillette, a cooper at Monticello, and his wife Martha. The elder Moses made pails and firkins in his own time to sell to the Monticello household. He was sold after Jefferson’s death to a local miller. After emancipation in 1865, he moved to southern Ohio to live near his brother Israel Gillette Jefferson.
The younger Moses remained in Albemarle County, buying ten acres of land across the Rivanna River from the Hydraulic Mills. He married three times and cared for a broad range of family members, raising more than twenty children. His descendants were unaware of the family’s connection to Monticello until 2006 and were pleased to learn of their ancestors’ contributions to it. They also spoke of the reluctance of the older generation to discuss the past: “We came from one of those families that didn’t talk a lot.”
Ruth Hearns Goodloe
Barbara Barnaby Graves
Barbara Graves and four other descendants of Monticello gatekeeper Eliza Tolliver Coleman were interviewed together in 1995. All live in the Washington, DC, area and work (or worked) in various departments of the federal government. They shared their memories of Eliza Coleman’s daughters Lucy Coleman Barnaby Page and Grace Coleman Harris and recalled summers spent at the Monticello gatehouse. Members of the extended Coleman family lived at Monticello for more than a century—far longer than any of the property’s owners.
Teresa Young Hampton
Patti Jo Medley Harding
Patti Jo Harding became the family historian and, with the help of her cousin Diana Redman and Getting Word consultant, Beverly Gray, has been gathering information from courthouses and graveyards to understand the rich history of her family. She was present at the very first Getting Word interview, with other members of her family. She said, “Everybody keeps talking about Thomas Jefferson, … but I’d like to find out more about Sally.”
Bertha Trent Harmon
The Trent sisters—Janie Mosley, Omega Calimese, and Bertha Harmon—are descended from Betsy Hemmings through both their maternal and paternal lines. They heard the history of their connection to Monticello from their aunt Lucy Ann Trent, who was a teacher. Their grandparents, who purchased a Buckingham County farm in freedom, lost two of their sons in a West Virginia mine accident at the end of the nineteenth century. As Bertha Harmon said, they have a “strong willed, hard working, loving family,” a family that has always tried “to do the right thing, to try to help people that needed help and strive for the best.
Ozella Barnaby Harvey
Ozella Harvey and four other descendants of Monticello gatekeeper Eliza Tolliver Coleman were interviewed together in 1995. All live in the Washington, DC, area and work (or worked) in various departments of the federal government. They shared their memories of Eliza Coleman’s daughters Lucy Coleman Barnaby Page and Grace Coleman Harris and recalled summers spent at the Monticello gatehouse. Members of the extended Coleman family lived at Monticello for more than a century—far longer than any of the property’s owners.
Elizabeth Hemings
The majority of those interviewed for the Getting Word project trace their ancestry to Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings. According to her grandson Madison Hemings, she was the daughter of an English sea captain named Hemings and an enslaved woman. She came with her children to Monticello about 1775, part of the inheritance from John Wayles, Jefferson’s father-in-law. There she was a valued domestic servant. Over seventy-five of her descendants lived and worked at Monticello as butlers, seamstresses, weavers, carpenters, blacksmiths, gardeners, and musicians.
Elizabeth Hemings had twelve known children. According to Madison Hemings, six of them were fathered by Wayles (Robert, James, Thenia, Critta, Peter, and Sally). All of the men and women freed by Jefferson (either officially or unofficially) were her children or grandchildren. Oral histories passed through many generations of the descendants of her daughters Mary Hemings Bell, Betty Brown, and Sally Hemings include the tradition of descent from Jefferson.
Madison Hemings
Madison Hemings (1805-1877) was the second surviving son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Madison Hemings learned the woodworking trade from his uncle John Hemmings. He became free in 1827, according to the terms of Thomas Jefferson’s will. Hemings and his brother Eston left Monticello to live with their mother, Sally Hemings, in the town of Charlottesville. Together they purchased a lot and built a two-story brick and wood house.
In 1831, Madison Hemings married a free woman of color, Mary McCoy. In the late 1830s the Hemingses left Virginia for a rural community in southern Ohio, where Mary Hemings’s family was already settled. Madison Hemings helped build several structures in the notoriously anti-black town of Waverly. He gradually accumulated property and, by 1865, he and his family were living on their sixty-six-acre farm in Ross County. Madison and Mary Hemings raised nine children. When his recollections were recorded in 1873, he gave his history in a matter-of-fact manner, referring to Jefferson as his father a number of times. His reputation as a man of his word survived in the family of white neighbors to the present day.
Clara Lee Fisher
Clara Fisher, artist and counselor for a non-profit social service agency, is the mother of two boys and a graduate of Duquesne University. Her father, Edward James Lee, died when she was only eight. She remembers helping him in his vegetable garden and accompanying him on his rounds as a constable, serving subpoenas. She said, “My father always told me that Thomas Jefferson was his great-great-grandfather.” She is thus only four generations removed from Madison Hemings of Monticello. In 2009, a letter she wrote to Jefferson on the occasion of Barack Obama’s inauguration was published in Newsweek magazine.