In 1996, four generations of the Hughes family of Fauquier County came to Monticello soon after learning of their descent from Rev. Robert Hughes of Union Run Baptist Church and head gardener Wormley Hughes of Monticello. The connection might have been broken because their ancestor, also Wormley Hughes (1851-1901), left Albemarle County with the Union army in the confusion at the end of the Civil War. Lloyd Hughes, known as Peter, attended the University of Maryland and works for the Coca-Cola company.
Families
Lloyd Hughes, Sr.
In 1996, four generations of the Hughes family of Fauquier County came to Monticello soon after learning of their descent from Rev. Robert Hughes of Union Run Baptist Church and head gardener Wormley Hughes of Monticello. The connection might have been broken because their ancestor, also Wormley Hughes (1851-1901), left Albemarle County with the Union army in the confusion at the end of the Civil War.
Lloyd Hughes, a lifelong resident of Fauquier County, VA, served in the U. S. Army in World War II and afterward worked as a carpenter and cook. He was proud of how his daughter Karen White’s research made the connection to Monticello and recalled his father, John Henry Hughes, who worked with horses and as a gardener, as did his Monticello ancestor: “Gardening, it all comes back to that, yard and gardening.”
Timothy Hughes
In 1996, four generations of the Hughes family of Fauquier County came to Monticello soon after learning of their descent from Rev. Robert Hughes of Union Run Baptist Church and head gardener Wormley Hughes of Monticello. The connection might have been broken because their ancestor, also Wormley Hughes (1851-1901), left Albemarle County with the Union army in the confusion at the end of the Civil War.
Timothy Hughes was excited to learn of the minister in his family tree, since he was studying at Washington Bible College at the time and he bears a striking resemblance to Reverend Hughes. He recalled his conversations with his grandfather John Henry Hughes about a wide range of topics.
Warren Hughes
Wormley Hughes
Wormley Hughes was the oldest son of Betty Brown; his father has not been identified. As a boy, he worked in the Monticello house and the Mulberry Row nailery. He became head gardener, preparing flower beds and planting seeds, bulbs, and trees. He also had charge of the valuable carriage and saddle horses in the Monticello stables. He dug the grave of his master, who had called him “one of the most trusty servants I have.
Wormley Hughes and his wife, Ursula Granger, a niece of Isaac Granger Jefferson, had twelve children. Hughes was informally freed by Jefferson’s daughter Martha Randolph, while the rest of his family was sold at the 1827 dispersal sale. Ursula and some of their children were acquired by the Randolphs, for whom Hughes continued to work. The Randolphs long remembered one of his expressions: “I am in no wise discouraged.” Wormley and Ursula Hughes’s descendants include several ministers, as well as farmers, gardeners, blacksmiths, teachers, and archivists.
Ruth Fleming Hunt
Ann-Elizabeth Fossett Isaacs
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.”
Brian Isaacs
Sally Hemings
Sally Hemings was born in 1773 at The Forest, the plantation home of her enslaver and father, John Wayles. Her mother was Elizabeth Hemings, an enslaved, mixed-race woman who was also owned by John Wayles (the father of Martha Wayles Skelton, Jefferson’s wife). Following John Wayles’ death, the Hemingses (Sally Hemings, her mother, and her siblings) were brought to Monticello in 1774 as a part of Thomas Jefferson’s inheritance from his father-in-law. As of now, we know little about Sally Hemings’ early childhood.
Martha Wayles Skelton, Jefferson’s wife and Sally Hemings’ half-sister, died in September of 1782. In 1784, Thomas Jefferson left Virginia for Paris to serve as Minister to France. His youngest daughters, Maria and Lucy, went to Eppington Plantation (the home of Jefferson’s sister-in-law), with Sally Hemings sent with them as a lady’s maid. Three years later, in 1787, a 14-year-old Sally Hemings accompanied Maria Jefferson on her trans-Atlantic voyage to reunite with her father and older sister in France.
Hemings spent two years in Paris as a lady’s maid to Jefferson’s daughters, where she had the option of suing for her freedom. According to Madison Hemings’ recollections, upon his mother’s return to Monticello in 1789 at the age of 16, she was “enciente,” or pregnant, by Thomas Jefferson. Thereafter, she labored as a domestic servant in the main house, and Jefferson referred to her as “Maria’s maid” in 1799. In the years that followed, Sally Hemings had at least six children by Jefferson:
- A child born shortly after their return from France
- Harriet Hemings (1795-1797)
- Beverly Hemings (1798-post 1822)
- Daughter (1799-1800)
- Harriet Hemings (1801-post 1822)
- Madison Hemings (1805-1877)
- Eston Hemings (1808-1856)
Madison Hemings’ recollections state that while in Paris, Jefferson promised his mother that he would free any children they might have when they reached the age of twenty-one. Four of their six children survived to adulthood, and all of them became free close to their twenty-first birthdays. In 1822, Beverly Hemings and his sister Harriet Hemings were allowed to leave Monticello without pursuit and passed into white society. Madison Hemings and Eston Hemings were two of the five individuals freed by Jefferson in his will.
Sally Hemings was unofficially freed after Jefferson’s death in 1826 and lived with her sons Madison and Eston in Charlottesville until her own death in 1835.
Jane Aileen Gordon Floyd
Jane Floyd was born in St. Louis but spent summers at the Selma, Ohio, farm of her maternal grandparents, John Penn and Barbara Ann Woodson. She first learned of her lineage when she shared her elopement plans with her mother, Jane Ann Woodson Gordon (1890–1972). “That’s how she happened to tell me about being descended from Thomas Jefferson.”
Mrs. Floyd studied at Stowe Teacher’s College and the University of Southern California, among many other institutions, and worked as a teacher. She married Samuel Kaiser and had two sons, Arthur and James. When Arthur was denied admission to an all-white Catholic school in 1943, Mrs. Floyd fought to desegregate Catholic schools in St. Louis. Two years later, “they opened them up,” she recalled. Both of her sons became successful businessmen. James Kaiser is a founder of the Black Executive Leadership Council.
Joseph Fossett
Monticello blacksmith Joseph Fossett, freed by Jefferson in his will, had to struggle to reunite his family after they were sold at the dispersal sale in 1827. With the support of his free relatives, including his mother, Mary Hemings Bell, he had achieved the freedom of his wife, Edith Hern Fossett, and five of their ten children by 1837. They then moved to Ohio, settling in Cincinnati by 1843.In this thriving city on the dividing line between slavery and freedom, the Fossetts did not turn their backs on those still in bondage. Joseph Fossett and his sons William, Daniel, and Jesse pursued the blacksmithing trade and the whole family actively participated in helping fugitive slaves traveling the Underground Railroad. Almost all of the Fossett children reached Ohio before their parents’ deaths. It took until 1850 in the case of their son Peter Fossett, who became a renowned minister.
Joseph and Edith Fossett’s descendants include artists, attorneys, caterers, civil servants, and musicians. In every generation Fossetts fought for freedom and equality, the most famous among them being William Monroe Trotter.