Families
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.
Bossie Young, Jr.
Brown Young
Florida Owens Young
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
Maxcine Mercer Sterling
Maxcine Sterling 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.