George “Jack” Pettiford grew up in a mostly white neighborhood in Greenfield in a still segregated Ohio. After playing baseball with his white friends, he could not go to a restaurant with them afterward. When he joined the Navy in World War II, he was pressed to enter a white unit and had to insist that he serve with blacks. He and his wife, Jacqueline Diggs, raised four children in Columbus. He attained a supervisory position at the Rockwell Corporation only after many disappointments because of discrimination. He and his wife and his sister Ann Medley participated in the very first interview of the Getting Word project in 1993. While the women were criticizing the sexual behavior of Jefferson and other slaveholders, Jack raised his voice to say, “But overall he was a great man… And he’s history. He’s history and he’s great.”
Families
Jacqueline Diggs Pettiford
Jacqueline Diggs grew up on a farm in Jackson County, Ohio, member of a family of very light-skinned people who “went as black,” as she says. Her own appearance made it possible for her to help to break down segregation in the job market in Columbus. She was married to George “Jack” Pettiford for more than forty years and they raised four children. When asked when he told her about his ancestry, she laughingly said, “I thought it was a joke. I thought he was being funny. But I had hopes — I had hopes that he would turn out like Thomas Jefferson.”
Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely
Peggy Preacely, a writer, filmmaker, and public health worker, learned her family history from her mother, Ellen Craft Dammond, the “griot of the family,” who recognized that “there were wonderful stories that needed to be kept alive in the family.” Her mother was a niece of William Monroe Trotter as well as a descendant of the famous fugitive slaves William and Ellen Craft.
Mother and daughter both participated in the civil rights movement. Ellen Dammond worked with Dorothy Height and Polly Cowan in the Wednesdays in Mississippi initiative. Peggy Preacely, who sees herself as carrying on a double family line of “freedom fighters,” joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was jailed for sit-ins in the south. As she said, “I had to do something in my lifetime to make a difference because Uncle Monroe did and the Crafts escaped from slavery.”
Diana Redman
Diana Redman graduated from Ohio State University and works in the Ohio Department of Human Services. After she won a Daughters of the American Revolution essay contest in high school, her grandmother Ida Mae Young Redman told her of her connection to Thomas Jefferson. She has a love of history, especially about the lives and contributions of “everyday” people, and is proud of her family: “Whatever you want to do, the family is here to support and help you accomplish what you want.”
Shallie Barrett Marshall
Andrew Jackson Roberts
Andrew J. Roberts was the son of Giles and Nancy Roberts, who moved from Mecklenburg County, VA, to rural Ross County, OH, soon after his birth. The Robertses were neighbors of Madison Hemings and his family. A. J. Roberts attended Wilberforce and Oberlin colleges and taught school for fourteen years in Ohio and Tennessee. In 1878 he married Ellen Hemings. Nine years later, with two young children (Frederick and Estelle), they left their home and families in Ross County to settle in Los Angeles.
Working first as a drayman, A. J. Roberts and a friend soon built up what became the Los Angeles Van, Truck and Storage Company. In the early 1900s Roberts opened the first black-owned mortuary in Los Angeles, in which his sons Frederick M. Roberts and William Giles Roberts were also associated. He was a founder of Tabernacle Baptist Church, was active in the National Urban League, and was described in an obituary as “one of California’s most progressive pioneer citizens.”
Ann Pettiford Medley
Ann Pettiford Medley grew up in Greenfield, Ohio. She and her husband, Cecil Medley, raised five children and worked in the catering and food services field. It was her daughter Patti Jo Harding who began to research the family history and enlisted the help of her cousin Diana Redman and Getting Word consultant Beverly Gray. Mother and daughter were present at Getting Word’s first interview in Chillicothe in 1993. Ann Medley remembers Sunday visits to her grandmother Anna Young Pettiford, some of whose siblings passed into the white world, cutting ties with the family.
Annette Woodson Roberts
Mabel Hall Middleton
Mabel Hall Pittman Middleton, writer and teacher, grew up in Lexington, Virginia. After serving in the Women’s Army Corps in World War II and graduating from Fisk University, she taught English in Mississippi. She obtained her doctorate from Southern Illinois University and chaired the English Department at Jackson State University. She was appointed to the Mississippi Humanities Council in 2000.
Dr. Middleton, who married and had three children, heard from her family of her connection to Monticello but did not hear of her ancestor Brown Colbert’s emigration to Liberia.
Janie Trent Mosley
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.
Eston Hemings Jefferson
Eston Hemings was the youngest son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Eston Hemings learned the woodworking trade from his uncle, John Hemmings, and became free in 1829, according to the terms of Thomas Jefferson’s will. He and his brother Madison left Monticello to live in the town of Charlottesville with their mother, Sally Hemings. Together they purchased a lot and built a two-story brick and wood house.
In 1832, Eston Hemings married a free woman of color, Julia Ann Isaacs. About 1838 they sold their property and moved to Chillicothe, OH, where Hemings led a very successful dance band. He was remembered as “a master of the violin, and an accomplished ‘caller’ of dances.”
At mid-century Eston and Julia Hemings and their three children, John Wayles, Anna, and Beverly, left Ohio for Wisconsin, changing their surname to Jefferson and living henceforth as white people. They settled in the capital, Madison, where Eston Jefferson pursued his trade as a cabinetmaker. A 1998 study genetically linked his male descendants with male descendants of the Jefferson family.
Isaac Granger Jefferson
Isaac Jefferson’s father, George Granger, was the only enslaved man to serve as Monticello overseer, while his mother, Ursula Granger, was a particularly trusted household servant. Trained in metalworking, including apprenticeship to a Philadelphia tinner, Isaac Granger worked in the Monticello blacksmith shop and nail factory, and briefly operated a tin shop.
He, his wife, Iris, and their sons Squire and Joyce became the property of Jefferson’s son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph in the late 1790s. In the 1820s Granger gained his freedom and moved to Petersburg, VA, where he practiced his trade as a blacksmith until his death.
Isaac Granger, who adopted the surname Jefferson toward the end of his life, was known in Petersburg for his stories of life at Monticello. His vivid recollections were taken down by Charles Campbell in the 1840s, but not published until 1951, along with a striking daguerreotype of the blacksmith. Campbell noted that Isaac Jefferson “bore a good character.”