Hemings
Virginia Craft Rose
Virginia Rose was the daughter of Elizabeth Letitia (Bessie) Trotter and Henry Kempton Craft, a Harvard graduate, electrical engineer, teacher, and YMCA executive. He was the grandson of William and Ellen Craft, famous for their daring escape from slavery in 1848. Bessie Trotter, who attended the New England Conservatory of Music, was the sister of the prominent civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter.
Virginia Rose attended the University of Pittsburgh, graduated from Barnard College, and did graduate work at Western Reserve University. She married Joshua Rose in 1934 and they moved to California, where he headed the Oakland branch of the YMCA. She passed her pride in her Trotter and Craft heritage along to their three children, who shared memories of cross-country car trips to keep up with their East Coast roots. Only late in life did Mrs. Rose begin to “ponder” her connection to the Fossetts of Monticello. As she said in 2006, “You don’t know who you are until you know where you came from.”
Jesse Scott
Jesse Scott, son of a Pamunkey Indian, was a violinist and dance band leader well known throughout Virginia. One contemporary recalled a dance at which Scott and his sons Robert and James formed the band: “Such music they made as the gods of Terpsichore will never hear again in this generation.” At the 1827 Monticello dispersal sale, Jesse Scott represented his wife’s family. He purchased his sister-in-law Edith Fossett and two of her children, so they would not be separated from their husband and father, Joseph Fossett.
Robert Scott
Robert Scott was born free, the son of Sarah Bell and Jesse Scott, a free man of color whose mother was a Pamunkey Indian. The Scott trio (Robert, his brother James, and his father) were well known musicians who traveled all over Virginia playing at dances at private homes, mountain resorts, and the University of Virginia
Scott married Nancy Colbert, probably the daughter of Burwell and Critta Colbert of Monticello. He was able to purchase her and some of their nine children out of slavery. In 1857 Robert Scott, who had more than three-quarters white ancestry, successfully petitioned the court to be declared “not negro”–an intermediate status between white and black or “mulatto.”
Robert Scott lived in the Bell-Scott house on Charlottesville’s main street for almost ninety years. He was a rich source of recollections about Jefferson and, at his death, was described as “a man who in the course of a long life never failed to command the respect of his fellow citizens.”
George Pettiford
George “Jack” Pettiford grew up in a mostly white neighborhood in Greenfield in a still segregated Ohio. After playing baseball with his white friends, he could not go to a restaurant with them afterward. When he joined the Navy in World War II, he was pressed to enter a white unit and had to insist that he serve with blacks. He and his wife, Jacqueline Diggs, raised four children in Columbus. He attained a supervisory position at the Rockwell Corporation only after many disappointments because of discrimination. He and his wife and his sister Ann Medley participated in the very first interview of the Getting Word project in 1993. While the women were criticizing the sexual behavior of Jefferson and other slaveholders, Jack raised his voice to say, “But overall he was a great man… And he’s history. He’s history and he’s great.”
Jacqueline Diggs Pettiford
Jacqueline Diggs grew up on a farm in Jackson County, Ohio, member of a family of very light-skinned people who “went as black,” as she says. Her own appearance made it possible for her to help to break down segregation in the job market in Columbus. She was married to George “Jack” Pettiford for more than forty years and they raised four children. When asked when he told her about his ancestry, she laughingly said, “I thought it was a joke. I thought he was being funny. But I had hopes — I had hopes that he would turn out like Thomas Jefferson.”
Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely
Peggy Preacely, a writer, filmmaker, and public health worker, learned her family history from her mother, Ellen Craft Dammond, the “griot of the family,” who recognized that “there were wonderful stories that needed to be kept alive in the family.” Her mother was a niece of William Monroe Trotter as well as a descendant of the famous fugitive slaves William and Ellen Craft.
Mother and daughter both participated in the civil rights movement. Ellen Dammond worked with Dorothy Height and Polly Cowan in the Wednesdays in Mississippi initiative. Peggy Preacely, who sees herself as carrying on a double family line of “freedom fighters,” joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was jailed for sit-ins in the south. As she said, “I had to do something in my lifetime to make a difference because Uncle Monroe did and the Crafts escaped from slavery.”
Diana Redman
Diana Redman graduated from Ohio State University and works in the Ohio Department of Human Services. After she won a Daughters of the American Revolution essay contest in high school, her grandmother Ida Mae Young Redman told her of her connection to Thomas Jefferson. She has a love of history, especially about the lives and contributions of “everyday” people, and is proud of her family: “Whatever you want to do, the family is here to support and help you accomplish what you want.”
Andrew Jackson Roberts
Andrew J. Roberts was the son of Giles and Nancy Roberts, who moved from Mecklenburg County, VA, to rural Ross County, OH, soon after his birth. The Robertses were neighbors of Madison Hemings and his family. A. J. Roberts attended Wilberforce and Oberlin colleges and taught school for fourteen years in Ohio and Tennessee. In 1878 he married Ellen Hemings. Nine years later, with two young children (Frederick and Estelle), they left their home and families in Ross County to settle in Los Angeles.
Working first as a drayman, A. J. Roberts and a friend soon built up what became the Los Angeles Van, Truck and Storage Company. In the early 1900s Roberts opened the first black-owned mortuary in Los Angeles, in which his sons Frederick M. Roberts and William Giles Roberts were also associated. He was a founder of Tabernacle Baptist Church, was active in the National Urban League, and was described in an obituary as “one of California’s most progressive pioneer citizens.”
Annette Woodson Roberts
Shallie Barrett Marshall
Ann Pettiford Medley
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.