Israel Gillette Jefferson, the son of Edward and Jane Gillette, worked as a boy in the Monticello house, the kitchen, and the textile shop. From age thirteen, he was also a postilion, riding one of the four horses that pulled Jefferson’s landau carriage. He was sold after Jefferson’s death to Thomas Walker Gilmer, who became Secretary of the Navy. The earnings of his second wife, a free seamstress, Elizabeth Farrow Randolph, helped him purchase his freedom from Gilmer.
At the suggestion of the clerk who wrote out his free papers in 1844, he adopted the surname Jefferson. He and his wife then moved to Ohio, where he first worked as a waiter on an Ohio River steamboat and then bought a farm in Pike County. The Jeffersons were active members of Eden Baptist Church, where Israel Jefferson was deacon and treasurer.
In 1873 Israel Jefferson’s recollections of his life at Monticello and in Ohio were published in a Pike County newspaper.
Calvin Jefferson, who is descended from the Grangers as well as the Hemingses of Monticello, grew up in Washington, DC. After working for the U. S. Postal Service, he became an archivist for the National Archives and Records Administration, from which he retired in 2007 after thirty years. He did not learn of his family’s connection to Monticello until 1996. He has a strong interest in his family history and continues research on the Hemings family, particularly Betty Brown and her descendants.
John Wayles Jefferson, the oldest child of Eston Hemings and Julia Isaacs Jefferson, lived as an African American in southern Ohio until the age of fifteen, when his family moved to Madison, Wisconsin, changed their surname from Hemings to Jefferson, and thereafter lived as white people. He operated a restaurant and the city’s oldest hotel until the Civil War, when he joined the 8th Wisconsin infantry regiment as its major. Over three years of arduous campaigns in Mississippi and Louisiana he rose to the rank of colonel, at one time commanding the whole regiment. When he encountered an acquaintance from his Ohio years, he begged him “not to tell the fact that he had colored blood in his veins, which he said was not suspected by any of his command.”
After the war, John Wayles Jefferson settled in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was a prominent citizen, plantation owner, and wealthy cotton broker. He never married and died in Memphis, described in an obituary as “a model man.”
Julia Ann Isaacs, daughter of German Jewish merchant David Isaacs and Nancy West, a free woman of color, lived with her family on Charlottesville’s main street until 1832, when she married Eston Hemings. About 1838 they moved to Chillicothe in southern Ohio, where Hemings led a popular dance band.
At mid-century the Hemingses made a fateful decision. They and their three children, John Wayles, Anna, and Beverly, left Ohio for Madison, Wisconsin, changing their surname to Jefferson and living henceforth as white people. Julia Jefferson an active member of the Congregational church and, in the Civil War, the Ladies Aid Society. Her sons and grandsons, whom she helped raise, prospered in society, business, and the professions. Many years after her death she was still remembered in her family as “its best and bravest character.”
Ann-Elizabeth Fossett was the daughter of Joseph Fossett, an enslaved blacksmith, and Edith Hern Fossett, an enslaved cook at Monticello. While her father was freed in Jefferson’s will, Ann-Elizabeth, her mother, and six of her siblings were sold in the 1827 dispersal sale. Through her family’s efforts, Ann-Elizabeth gained her freedom in 1837 and moved with her parents, her husband, Tucker Isaacs, and their children to Ohio. The Isaacs family remained in Ohio only a few years, returning to Charlottesville, where a number of their family members remained, some still in slavery.
In 1850, Ann-Elizabeth Isaacs and her family returned to Ohio, settling on a 158-acre farm in Ross County. Their home is still remembered as a station on the Underground Railroad and their descendants—most notably William Monroe Trotter—continued the fight for freedom and racial equality. As descendant Virginia Craft Rose said in her interview, “Whatever you feel strongly about, fight for it because that’s part of your heritage.”
Sally Hemings came to Monticello as an infant as part of Jefferson’s inheritance from his father-in-law, John Wayles. She spent two years as lady’s-maid to Jefferson’s daughters in Paris, where she could have claimed her freedom. After returning to Monticello in 1789, she was a domestic servant in the main house. She was unofficially freed after Jefferson’s death in 1826 and lived with her sons Madison and Eston in Charlottesville until her own death.
Years after his wife’s death, Thomas Jefferson fathered at least six of Sally Hemings’s children. Four survived to adulthood and are mentioned in Jefferson’s plantation records: Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings. According to her son Madison Hemings, Jefferson promised Sally Hemings in Paris to free any children they might have at the age of twenty-one. Four of their children reached adulthood and became free close to their twenty-first birthdays. Beverly Hemings and his sister Harriet Hemings were allowed to leave Monticello without pursuit and passed into white society. Madison Hemingsand Eston Hemings Jefferson — freed by the terms of Jefferson’s will — left for Ohio in the 1830s and chose to live on different sides of the color line.
Betsy Hemmings (the surname is spelled with two m’s by Betsy and her descendants) was born at Monticello in 1783, daughter of Mary Hemings and an unidentified father. According to her family’s oral history, her father was Thomas Jefferson, and Jefferson’s son-in-law John Wayles Eppes was the father of her children.
As an infant Hemmings was taken to live with Thomas Bell, a respected white merchant in Charlottesville, to whom her mother had been hired while Jefferson was in France. Thomas Bell and Mary Hemings later had two children together and lived together in what their neighbors came to consider a common-law marriage. When Mary Hemings asked to be sold to Bell in 1792, Jefferson consented, agreeing to sell with her only “such of her younger children as she chose.” Nine-year-old sister Betsy and her twelve-year-old brother Joe Fossett returned to live in bondage at Monticello, while their mother and younger half-siblings became free and inherited Bell’s estate.
In 1797, at age fourteen, Hemmings was once again forced to leave Monticello and her family after Jefferson gave her to his daughter Maria and her husband John Wayles Eppes as part of their marriage settlement. When Maria died in 1804, Hemmings was relocated a further time when Eppes moved with his young son Francis Wayles Eppes to Millbrook, in Buckingham County, Virginia, where he and his second wife, Martha Burke Jones, lived and had four children.
Because she lived and died in bondage and because the Buckingham County records burned in 1869, it has not been possible to learn the names of all of Betsy Hemmings’s own children. However, her descendants (including Edna Jacques, pictured above) have not forgotten their connection to her. Their family stories and those of descendants of John and Martha Jones Eppes shed light on the close ties of family as well as the separations of slavery that must have been felt by Betsy Hemmings. They tell of her distress when some of her children were taken by Francis Eppes to Florida in 1828,
When Betsy Hemmings died in 1857 at age seventy-three, the Eppes family commissioned an elaborate grave marker for her adjacent to that of John Wayles Eppes, who had died in 1823. The two markers, so similar and so near, do nothing to dispel the stories of her relationship with Eppes and his family. As a testament to the love felt by those with whom she lived, Betsy Hemmings’s inscription begins, “Sacred to the Memory of our Mammy, Betsey Hemmings who was Mother, Sister & Friend to all who knew her. The pure in heart shall see God.”
Three daughters of Consuelo and Elmer Wayles Roberts were interviewed together in Los Angeles: Paula Henderson, Robin Roberts-Martin, and Ellen Hodnett, a teacher and school principal. They recalled their father, a graduate of U.C.L.A., a mortician, and a probation officer. In 1976 he told Time magazine he thought Thomas Jefferson would be “unhappy about man’s inability to learn anything about living with his fellow man, despite all the advances in technology.”
The Roberts sisters had vivid memories of their grandfather William Giles Roberts, who ran the family mortuary before moving to his farm northeast of Los Angeles. They are proud of the Robertses as one of the earliest and most influential black families in Los Angeles. As for their Jefferson ancestry, the genetic tests of 1998 were “just a scientific confirmation of what we already knew.” As Paula Henderson said, “It was really important in the Roberts family that each person do something important. It didn’t matter who your relatives were if you didn’t do something yourself.”
Lewis Hern, like his father and grandfather before him, did not live with his wife and children. Several generations of Herns had “abroad” marriages, in which husband and wife belonged to different owners, a common feature of slavery in Virginia. Although Lewis Hern and Georgeanna were married by an Episcopal minister in 1853, they had to live apart until freedom came in 1865.
In the post-war years, Lewis Hern progressed from being a farmworker at Edgehill, the plantation of Jefferson’s grandson Thomas J. Randolph, to becoming the owner of his own farm. He was a founding deacon of Union Run Baptist Church and, together with George Hughes, purchased a hundred acres of Albemarle County land in 1870. At that time Hern was one of relatively few rural residents in the county to send his children to school. The Hern (now Hearns) family’s stress on education as well as their ties to the land, the Hughes family, and Union Run Church have continued in succeeding generations to the present day.
