Families
Donald Gillette
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.
Christopher Day
Noel Day, Jr.
Stephen De Windt
Stephen De Windt moved with his family from the San Francisco Bay area to Pasadena when he was twelve. He attended Pasadena City College and Arizona State University. After a career in the airline industry, he became an actor—a “background artist”—in Hollywood.
De Windt heard a great deal about his talented great-great-aunt Pauline Powell Burns from the women in his family. Fascinated by his family history, he made a number of donations to the collections of the African American Museum and Library at Oakland. He was not fully aware of his connection to the Fossetts of Monticello until 2006. When he heard their story, his response was, “They stepped up to the plate.”
Doris Diggs
Eliga Diggs
Through his mother, Minnie Lee Young Diggs, Eliga Diggs is descended from Reuben and Susan Scott, enslaved foreman and domestic servant, brought to northern Alabama by Jefferson’s great-grandson William Stuart Bankhead in 1846. From the age of eight Diggs had to work hard on the family tenant farm, on land rented from Bankhead’s descendants, the Hotchkiss family. He served two years in the U. S. Army, had various construction jobs, and was a control room operator at a paper mill when he retired. He has been active in local civic organizations and once ran for mayor of North Courtland.
Eliga and Doris Owens Diggs have four children, one of whom married professional baseball player Gary Redus. While he didn’t hear stories of the Scotts, he remembers hearing about his great-grandmother Mildred Scott Young, who loved roses: “The roses are still at the old home site there.”
Lester B. Diggs
Lester B. Diggs, who has lived in Courtland his whole life, attended Alabama State University and worked for Reynolds Metals Company. Through his mother, Minnie Lee Young Diggs, he is descended from Reuben and Susan Scott, enslaved foreman and domestic servant, brought to northern Alabama by Jefferson’s great-grandson William Stuart Bankhead in 1846.
Diggs grew up on a farm owned by the Hotchkiss family, who are Bankhead descendants, and he describes cotton cultivation in his interview. He also recalls meeting Martin Luther King in 1956 in Montgomery, shortly after King’s house was fire-bombed.
Bessie Baskerville Dorsey
Bessie Dorsey was a descendant of Wormley and Ursula Hughes through their grandson Philip Evans Hughes (1853-1925). Mrs. Dorsey lived most of her life in Washington, DC, raising and providing an education to her son, George Harrod, who went on to hold several prominent positions in the federal government. Her relatives have relied on her memories in their exploration of their family history.
Sarah Woodson Early
Sarah Woodson, the youngest child of Thomas and Jemima Woodson, exemplified her family’s commitment to the fields of education and religion. By the age of five, she had memorized large parts of the Bible. She graduated from Oberlin College in 1856 and then began her long career as a teacher in Ohio, North Carolina, and Tennessee. She was one of the first African American women on a college faculty, at Wilberforce University, of which her brother Lewis Woodson was a founding trustee.
In 1868 she married Jordan Winston Early, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church and, as she wrote, assisted “in all of his most arduous duties.” She was national superintendent of the Colored Division of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and lectured widely on temperance, self-improvement, and the role of women. In 1894 she published a biography of her husband.