Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
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.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by Auriana Woods -
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:
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.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Three daughters of Consuelo and Elmer Wayles Roberts were interviewed together in Los Angeles: Paula Henderson, Robin Roberts-Martin, and Ellen Hodnett, a teacher and school principal. They recalled their father, a graduate of U.C.L.A., a mortician, and a probation officer. In 1976 he told Time magazine he thought Thomas Jefferson would be “unhappy about man’s inability to learn anything about living with his fellow man, despite all the advances in technology.”
The Roberts sisters had vivid memories of their grandfather William Giles Roberts, who ran the family mortuary before moving to his farm northeast of Los Angeles. They are proud of the Robertses as one of the earliest and most influential black families in Los Angeles. As for their Jefferson ancestry, the genetic tests of 1998 were “just a scientific confirmation of what we already knew.” As Paula Henderson said, “It was really important in the Roberts family that each person do something important. It didn’t matter who your relatives were if you didn’t do something yourself.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Three daughters of Consuelo and Elmer Wayles Roberts were interviewed together in Los Angeles: Paula Henderson, Robin Roberts-Martin, and Ellen Hodnett, a teacher and school principal. They recalled their father, a graduate of U.C.L.A., a mortician, and a probation officer. In 1976 he told Time magazine he thought Thomas Jefferson would be “unhappy about man’s inability to learn anything about living with his fellow man, despite all the advances in technology.”
The Roberts sisters had vivid memories of their grandfather William Giles Roberts, who ran the family mortuary before moving to his farm northeast of Los Angeles. They are proud of the Robertses as one of the earliest and most influential black families in Los Angeles. As for their Jefferson ancestry, the genetic tests of 1998 were “just a scientific confirmation of what we already knew.” As Paula Henderson said, “It was really important in the Roberts family that each person do something important. It didn’t matter who your relatives were if you didn’t do something yourself.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Fountain Hughes spent his boyhood in slavery on the Hydraulic Mills property of the Burnley family near Charlottesville. After the Civil War, in which his father was killed while with the Confederate Army, his mother, Mary Hughes, had to hire Fountain out for a dollar a month. In the 1880s he purchased horses and a carriage and worked as a hack driver, but soon sought greater opportunities in Baltimore, MD. There he worked for several decades for the Shirley family as a farmer and gardener.
An interview with Fountain Hughes in 1949 is among the few surviving sound recordings of former slaves. He had vivid memories of slavery in central Virginia and of the harsh conditions for black people during and after the Civil War. His longevity attracted notice and led to numerous articles about him in Baltimore newspapers. Shallie Marshall, his only surviving descendant, remembers outings to the Shirley farm to visit her great-grandfather, “Pap.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
George Hughes was related to two important enslaved families at Monticello, the Hemings family through his father and the Granger family through his mother, Ursula Granger Hughes (1787–after 1847). After Jefferson’s death in 1826, Hughes, his mother, and his siblings remained in slavery at Edgehill, the plantation of Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph; his father was given his freedom unofficially.
After Emancipation in 1865, George Hughes was a farm manager at Edgehill, while his wife, Sarah Jane, was cook at the Edgehill School for Girls. Hughes was a deacon of the Union Run Baptist church pastored by his brother Rev. Robert Hughes. In 1870 George Hughes and his friend Lewis Hern, grandson of Monticello slaves David and Isabel Hern, made a successful bid for one hundred acres of Albemarle County farmland. Hughes and Hern (Hearns) descendants still live on the property today.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Clara Fisher, artist and counselor for a non-profit social service agency, is the mother of two boys and a graduate of Duquesne University. Her father, Edward James Lee, died when she was only eight. She remembers helping him in his vegetable garden and accompanying him on his rounds as a constable, serving subpoenas. She said, “My father always told me that Thomas Jefferson was his great-great-grandfather.” She is thus only four generations removed from Madison Hemings of Monticello. In 2009, a letter she wrote to Jefferson on the occasion of Barack Obama’s inauguration was published in Newsweek magazine.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
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.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Patti Jo Harding became the family historian and, with the help of her cousin Diana Redman and Getting Word consultant, Beverly Gray, has been gathering information from courthouses and graveyards to understand the rich history of her family. She was present at the very first Getting Word interview, with other members of her family. She said, “Everybody keeps talking about Thomas Jefferson, … but I’d like to find out more about Sally.”
