Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Madison Hemings’s wife, Mary, was born into a mixed-race family of free blacks who lived near Monticello. Her mother was Eliza Hughes McCoy, daughter of a white landowner, Stephen Hughes, and his slave Chana (Chaney), whom he freed in 1798. Mary McCoy and Madison Hemings married in 1831 and lived with his mother, Sally Hemings, in a house on the main road west of Charlottesville.
After Sally Hemings’s death, the Hemingses sold their house and left for southern Ohio, settling on the border of Ross and Pike counties. They joined a rural community populated by many other mixed-race families from Albemarle County, including Mary McCoy Hemings’s own extended family, some of whom were involved in the Underground Railroad.
Mary and Madison Hemings raised nine children and spent their last years on their sixty-six-acre farm in Ross County.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Betty Ann Fitch is part of an extended family that worked and lived at Monticello for more than a century. She earned her master’s degree in English and became a teacher. She was particularly close to her grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Henderson Fitch, who was orphaned at age four and taken in by the Levy-Mayhoff family, the owners of Monticello. Mary Elizabeth Henderson lived with and worked for the Mayhoffs for more than twenty years, spending long periods in New York City as well as Monticello. She married Thomas Jefferson Fitch, the Monticello coachman and chauffeur. Betty Ann Fitch is her family’s history-keeper and treasures a quilt made by her grandmother and her sewing circle.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
William Cunningham, who worked for many years for the Meade Corporation, was living at the time of his interview in the house in which he was born, across the street from the house lived in by his great-grandparents Tucker and Ann-Elizabeth Isaacs. He participated in the Getting Word project to honor his mother, Ann Elizabeth Isaacs Cunningham, who attended Boston Music School and was a church organist. He and his wife, Mae Catherine Wingo, raised six children. When asked how he felt about Thomas Jefferson, he replied “I would like to know more about Mary Hemings than hear all the talk about him.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Ellen Dammond, who was a social worker and personnel supervisor, was descended from both the Fossetts of Monticello and the famous fugitive slaves William and Ellen Craft. The prominent equal rights activist William Monroe Trotter was her uncle. She felt strongly about preserving and passing on the history of the struggles for freedom and equality, and introduced a 1970s film on the Crafts. Both she and her daughter, Peggy Preacely, were active participants in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Ellen Dammond worked with Dorothy Height and Polly Cowan in the Wednesdays in Mississippi project. The 2006 Getting Word interview includes a 1995 recording of Ellen Dammond and her sister, Virginia Craft Rose, remembering their family and its history.
The William and Ellen Craft Story
Find out about the Craft ancestors, William and Ellen, an enslaved couple from Macon, Georgia, who made a daring escape to freedom.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
In 1996, four generations of the Hughes family of Fauquier County came to Monticello soon after learning of their descent from Rev. Robert Hughes of Union Run Baptist Church and head gardener Wormley Hughes of Monticello. The connection might have been broken because their ancestor, also Wormley Hughes (1851-1901), left Albemarle County with the Union army in the confusion at the end of the Civil War.
Like the other members of the Hughes family with whom she was interviewed in 1996, Angela Hughes Davidson only recently discovered her family’s connection to Monticello through her ancestor Wormley Hughes. Angela was born in Washington, D.C. and graduated from Howard University.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
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.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
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.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
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.
