Lucille Balthazar, only three generations removed from Madison Hemings of Monticello, heard of her connection to Jefferson from her father, William Giles Roberts, although he rarely spoke of it. He participated in the family mortuary business and owned a farm northeast of Los Angeles in the Apple Valley, where he had gardens and orchards. Mrs. Balthazar knew her grandmother, Ellen Hemings Roberts, well and loved to go to dinner at her house. Her grandmother “always set the table beautifully….each of us had our silver napkin rings with our name on it.”
Hemings
Shay Banks-Young
Shay Banks-Young was a radio and TV personality and poet in Columbus, Ohio. After genetic testing in 1998 established a connection between Madison Hemings’s brother Eston and Thomas Jefferson, she went on the Oprah Winfrey show and met Eston’s descendant Julia Jefferson Westerinen. Following that encounter, Banks-Young and Westerinen brought a discussion of racial issues, titled “A Conversation in Black and White,” to audiences around the country.
Mary Hemings Bell
Mary Hemings was Elizabeth Hemings’s oldest child. After the 1774 division of the estate of Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, she was brought with her family to Monticello, where she was a valued household servant. She had six children, the two youngest with white merchant Thomas Bell, who became her common-law husband. Bell purchased Mary Hemings and their children, Robert and Sarah, freed them, and bequeathed them his considerable property.
Jefferson was unwilling to sell Mary Hemings Bell’s older children, Joseph Fossett and Betsy Hemmings, who remained in slavery at Monticello. After Thomas Bell’s death in 1800, Mary—described in one court document as his “relict & widow”—lived with her children and grandchildren in a house on Charlottesville’s main street. She maintained close ties with her still-enslaved relations at Monticello. Her free status and property helped her son Joseph Fossett minimize the fragmenting of his family at the Monticello dispersal sale in 1827.
Edwana Jackson Bennett
Colby Boggs
Ethel Hughes Bolden
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.
Ethel Bolden heard that her grandfather Rev. Wormley Hughes, who was known to be a very hard worker, pastored several churches in Fauquier County. Her father, John Henry Hughes, was a deacon in his church. Her niece Karen Hughes White noted, “You go down to Aunt Ethel’s and there are flowers all over the place.”
Betty Brown
In 1772, Elizabeth Hemings’s second daughter, Betty Brown, was the first of her family to come to Monticello, as the enslaved personal maid of Jefferson’s wife Martha. In the words of a member of Jefferson’s family, Betty Brown was “quite a personage on the mountain.” After almost sixty years of domestic work in the main house, she was one of the last of the Hemingses to live on the Monticello mountaintop, remaining there until the property was sold in 1831.
Described as “light colored & decidedly good looking,” Betty Brown had seven children who lived to adulthood. Among these were enslaved head gardener Wormley Hughes, enslaved Monticello butler Burwell Colbert, and enslaved nailmaker Brown Colbert. Her sons Edwin and Robert both became runaways after being given and sold away from Monticello. Her daughter Melinda Colbert Freeman married and lived in freedom in Washington, DC. Betty Brown died in the early 1830s, probably before her daughter Mary Colbert and son Brown Colbert chose to seek freedom in the African colony of Liberia in 1833.
Pauline Powell Burns
Pauline Powell Burns, a great-granddaughter of Joseph and Edith Fossett, was born and raised in Oakland, California. Her grandmother, Isabella Fossett, was sold away from Monticello and her family at the age of eight, but succeeded in escaping to Boston in the 1840s, using a free pass forged by her brother Peter Fossett. Always at risk of re-enslavement because of the Fugitive Slave Act, Isabella joined the rest of her family in Cincinnati by 1860.
After Isabella’s death in 1872, her daughter, Josephine Turner, moved to Oakland with her husband, William W. Powell, a porter on the new transcontinental railroad. Their daughter Pauline demonstrated artistic and musical talent at a young age and pursued years of study of both painting and piano. She gave numerous public recitals in the Bay Area and was hailed as “the bright musical star of her state.” An exhibit of her paintings in 1890 was said to be the first by an African-American artist in California. She and her husband, Edward E. Burns, both cultural leaders in their community, left no descendants.