Hemings

Jacqueline Yurkoski

After being accepted at the University of Virginia, Jacqueline Yurkoski came to Charlottesville with her parents and agreed to answer some questions about how a Sally Hemings descendant of the younger generation feels about her ancestry.  She looks forward to a career in medicine.

Virginia Isaacs Trotter

Virginia Isaacs, daughter of Tucker and Ann-Elizabeth Fossett Isaacs, was raised on a farm in Ross County, Ohio.  After the Civil War she and her sister Maria Elizabeth Isaacs married two veterans of the Civil War, Lts. James Monroe Trotter and William H. Dupree.  Both couples settled in Boston, where Trotter and Dupree were well-known figures after distinguished service as officers in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry regiment.  Virginia Trotter and her sister were described by a contemporary as women of “charming sociability and cultured manners.” 

The Trotters lived in Hyde Park, a largely white suburb of Boston, and accumulated property, particularly after James Monroe Trotter’s appointment to the lucrative position of Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia.  They had three children, William Monroe, Maude, and Bessie.  After her husband’s early death, Virginia Trotter managed the family investments and supported her son Monroe, allowing him to establish the Boston Guardian, and become a leading voice in the early civil rights movement.

William Monroe Trotter

William Monroe Trotter, the most famous of known descendants of Monticello’s enslaved families, was the son of Virginia Isaacs and James Monroe Trotter. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, which he viewed as the exemplar of “real democracy.” But his world began to contract, as the Jim Crow line moved inexorably up from the south. He gave up a lucrative real estate business to start a newspaper, the Boston Guardian, and raised his voice against the accommodationist principles of Booker T. Washington. In 1905 he and W. E. B. Du Bois took the lead in founding the Niagara Movement, the precursor of the NAACP.

In his long, militant and uncompromising fight for “full equality in all things governmental, political, civil and judicial,” Trotter presented petitions, led picketing and demonstrations, and confronted presidents in the White House. His last national effort was described at the time as a movement for “the fulfillment of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence.”

Julia Jefferson Westerinen

Artist, businesswoman, and mother of four, Julia Westerinen did not learn of her connection to Monticello and her African American ancestry until the 1970s. After genetic testing in 1998 established a link between her family line and Jefferson’s, she went on the Oprah Winfrey show and met Shay Banks-Young, a descendant of Madison Hemings, brother of her ancestor Eston Hemings Jefferson.

Since then, they have been speaking to audiences around the country about their family history and issues of race in America.  In her joint interview with Banks-Young, Westerinen notes that since learning of her African American heritage, “I don’t see color anymore like I used to.”

Karen Hughes White

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. Their ancestor was Reverend Hughes’s son, also Wormley Hughes (1851-1901), who left Albemarle County with the Union army in the confusion at the end of the Civil War; his parents were “broken hearted.”

The research of Karen Hughes White, an archivist and founder of the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County, was the key to making her family’s connection to the Hughes, Granger, and Hemings families of Monticello. At the Getting Word Gathering in 1997, Karen’s extended family members said that, thanks to her, they were “overwhelmed with joy” to be brought together in the place of their ancestors.