Families
Johnny James Young
Johnny James Young was descended from Susan Scott, a Monticello slave who was brought to northern Alabama by Jefferson’s great-grandson William Stuart Bankhed in 1846. When Young was growing up, his family was still closely tied to Bankhead’s descendants and some family members lived on and farmed their land. Johnny James Young helped with the cotton crop as a child and raised cotton as an adult. “I’ve been a farmer all my life,” he said. The church and music were important to him and for years he performed with a successful family gospel quartet, the “Young Memorial.” Today, many of Susan Scott’s descendants carry on a vibrant gospel music tradition.
Jacqueline Yurkoski
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.
Phyllis Johnson Williams
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.”
James L. Woodson
Jerry Smith Woodson
Lewis Woodson
Born in Greenbrier County, Virginia, Lewis Woodson moved with his family to Chillicothe, Ohio, about 1821. He became a teacher and a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church. In 1831 Woodson, his wife, Caroline Robinson, and their children relocated to Pittsburgh, where he started the first school for black children in the city and worked as a barber.
A trustee of Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio, Woodson was instrumental in its founding in 1863 as the first college owned and operated by African Americans. He was a dedicated abolitionist, active in the Underground Railroad. His newspaper writings forcefully advocated separate and independent institutions, like churches, schools, and communities, for African Americans, leading one author to call him the “Father of Black Nationalism.”
Thomas Woodson
Thomas and Jemima Woodson and their family left Greenbrier County, Virginia, for Chillicothe, Ohio, about 1821. There they participated in founding Quinn Chapel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, the first independent African American church west of the Alleghenies. In 1829 Woodson started a community of “very independent people” in rural Jackson County. By 1840 he owned 372 acres in a thriving settlement of nearly two hundred African Americans. One newspaper writer described the Woodsons as the most “intelligent, enterprising, farming family” in Ohio.
Of the Woodsons’ eleven children, three were ministers and five were teachers. Two of their sons were killed for assisting fugitive slaves in the Underground Railroad. Their descendants include many leaders in the fields of education, religion, law, and business. Descendants of at least five of Thomas Woodson’s children carry the enduring family tradition that he was the son of Thomas Jefferson.
Paternity of Thomas Woodson
Read a Monticello Research Report on the issue of Woodson’s possible connection to Jefferson and Monticello.
James Monroe Trotter
Born in slavery in Mississippi, James Monroe Trotter was educated in Ohio and became a schoolteacher. In June 1863 he and his friend William H. Dupree traveled to Boston to enlist in the 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Both were commissioned second lieutenants in 1864 but had to wait a year for official recognition. Trotter was one of most prominent spokesmen in the dispute over equal pay for African American soldiers.
After the war, Trotter and Dupree returned to Ohio, married sisters Virginia and Maria Elizabeth Isaacs, and moved to Boston where they obtained good positions in the U.S. Postal Service. In 1878 Trotter published a groundbreaking survey of African American music. His distinguished war record and support of the Democratic Party led to appointment as District of Columbia Recorder of Deeds in 1887, the highest government office open to blacks. Trotter’s passionate commitment to equality inspired his famous son, William Monroe Trotter.
Virginia Isaacs Trotter
Virginia Isaacs, daughter of Tucker and Ann-Elizabeth Fossett Isaacs, was raised on a farm in Ross County, Ohio. After the Civil War she and her sister Maria Elizabeth Isaacs married two veterans of the Civil War, Lts. James Monroe Trotter and William H. Dupree. Both couples settled in Boston, where Trotter and Dupree were well-known figures after distinguished service as officers in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry regiment. Virginia Trotter and her sister were described by a contemporary as women of “charming sociability and cultured manners.”
The Trotters lived in Hyde Park, a largely white suburb of Boston, and accumulated property, particularly after James Monroe Trotter’s appointment to the lucrative position of Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia. They had three children, William Monroe, Maude, and Bessie. After her husband’s early death, Virginia Trotter managed the family investments and supported her son Monroe, allowing him to establish the Boston Guardian, and become a leading voice in the early civil rights movement.
William Monroe Trotter
William Monroe Trotter, the most famous of known descendants of Monticello’s enslaved families, was the son of Virginia Isaacs and James Monroe Trotter. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, which he viewed as the exemplar of “real democracy.” But his world began to contract, as the Jim Crow line moved inexorably up from the south. He gave up a lucrative real estate business to start a newspaper, the Boston Guardian, and raised his voice against the accommodationist principles of Booker T. Washington. In 1905 he and W. E. B. Du Bois took the lead in founding the Niagara Movement, the precursor of the NAACP.
In his long, militant and uncompromising fight for “full equality in all things governmental, political, civil and judicial,” Trotter presented petitions, led picketing and demonstrations, and confronted presidents in the White House. His last national effort was described at the time as a movement for “the fulfillment of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence.”