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.
Families
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.
Zeta Brown Nichols
Zeta Brown Nichols grew up in Keswick, just east of Charlottesville. She shared memories of life in the area in the 1940s and 50s. Like many others in the Hern family, she became a teacher, initially in a one-room schoolhouse in western Albemarle County and later at Albemarle Training School. She learned of her connection to Monticello from her aunt Martha Hearns Boston, also a teacher.