Hemings

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.”

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.

Beverly Jefferson, the youngest child of Eston Hemings and Julia Isaacs Jefferson, lived as an African American in southern Ohio until the age of eleven, when his family moved to Madison, Wisconsin, changed their surname from Hemings to Jefferson, and thereafter lived as white people. Until 1872 Beverly Jefferson worked in the hotel business, becoming a very popular hotel proprietor after the Civil War. Thereafter he focused on what became the Jefferson Transfer Company, the leading carriage and omnibus firm in the capital. Long obituaries followed the death of this “well known and prominent citizen of Madison.” 

Beverly Jefferson and his wife, Anna Maud Smith, had five sons, who included graduates of the University of Wisconsin, a lawyer, and a physician. He apparently spoke of his descent from Thomas Jefferson only to close friends. Long after his death, his grandsons altered the family history to erase the connection to the Hemings family. Present-day descendants had no knowledge of their African American heritage until the 1970s.

Eston Hemings was the youngest son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Eston Hemings learned the woodworking trade from his uncle, John Hemmings, and became free in 1829, according to the terms of Thomas Jefferson’s will. He and his brother Madison left Monticello to live in the town of Charlottesville with their mother, Sally Hemings.  Together they purchased a lot and built a two-story brick and wood house. 

In 1832, Eston Hemings married a free woman of color, Julia Ann Isaacs.  About 1838 they sold their property and moved to Chillicothe, OH, where Hemings led a very successful dance band.  He was remembered as “a master of the violin, and an accomplished ‘caller’ of dances.”  

At mid-century Eston and Julia Hemings and their three children, John Wayles, Anna, and Beverly, left Ohio for Wisconsin, changing their surname to Jefferson and living henceforth as white people. They settled in the capital, Madison, where Eston Jefferson pursued his trade as a cabinetmaker.  A 1998 study genetically linked his male descendants with male descendants of the Jefferson family.