Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
The majority of those interviewed for the Getting Word project trace their ancestry to Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings. According to her grandson Madison Hemings, she was the daughter of an English sea captain named Hemings and an enslaved woman. She came with her children to Monticello about 1775, part of the inheritance from John Wayles, Jefferson’s father-in-law. There she was a valued domestic servant. Over seventy-five of her descendants lived and worked at Monticello as butlers, seamstresses, weavers, carpenters, blacksmiths, gardeners, and musicians.
Elizabeth Hemings had twelve known children. According to Madison Hemings, six of them were fathered by Wayles (Robert, James, Thenia, Critta, Peter, and Sally). All of the men and women freed by Jefferson (either officially or unofficially) were her children or grandchildren. Oral histories passed through many generations of the descendants of her daughters Mary Hemings Bell, Betty Brown, and Sally Hemings include the tradition of descent from Jefferson.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Madison Hemings (1805-1877) was the second surviving son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Madison Hemings learned the woodworking trade from his uncle John Hemmings. He became free in 1827, according to the terms of Thomas Jefferson’s will. Hemings and his brother Eston left Monticello to live with their mother, Sally Hemings, in the town of Charlottesville. Together they purchased a lot and built a two-story brick and wood house.
In 1831, Madison Hemings married a free woman of color, Mary McCoy. In the late 1830s the Hemingses left Virginia for a rural community in southern Ohio, where Mary Hemings’s family was already settled. Madison Hemings helped build several structures in the notoriously anti-black town of Waverly. He gradually accumulated property and, by 1865, he and his family were living on their sixty-six-acre farm in Ross County. Madison and Mary Hemings raised nine children. When his recollections were recorded in 1873, he gave his history in a matter-of-fact manner, referring to Jefferson as his father a number of times. His reputation as a man of his word survived in the family of white neighbors to the present day.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Madison Hemings’s wife, Mary, was born into a mixed-race family of free blacks who lived near Monticello. Her mother was Eliza Hughes McCoy, daughter of a white landowner, Stephen Hughes, and his slave Chana (Chaney), whom he freed in 1798. Mary McCoy and Madison Hemings married in 1831 and lived with his mother, Sally Hemings, in a house on the main road west of Charlottesville.
After Sally Hemings’s death, the Hemingses sold their house and left for southern Ohio, settling on the border of Ross and Pike counties. They joined a rural community populated by many other mixed-race families from Albemarle County, including Mary McCoy Hemings’s own extended family, some of whom were involved in the Underground Railroad.
Mary and Madison Hemings raised nine children and spent their last years on their sixty-six-acre farm in Ross County.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by Beth Sawyer -
Bessie Dorsey was a descendant of Wormley and Ursula Hughes through their grandson Philip Evans Hughes (1853-1925). Mrs. Dorsey lived most of her life in Washington, DC, raising and providing an education to her son, George Harrod, who went on to hold several prominent positions in the federal government. Her relatives have relied on her memories in their exploration of their family history.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Born in slavery in Lexington, Virginia, George Edmondson claimed his freedom in June 1864, when Union forces occupied the town. He evidently accompanied the army across the mountains into West Virginia after its defeat at Lynchburg a week later. He enlisted in the 45th regiment (later the 127th) of the U. S. Colored Infantry in Wheeling and took part in months of grueling trench warfare during the siege of Richmond and Petersburg. He was wounded, promoted to corporal, and was with the first Union troops to enter Petersburg. At war’s end, Edmondson was shipped with the rest of the all-black 25th Corps to the remote coast of Texas.
After his discharge, Edmondson returned to West Virginia, settling in Parkersburg with his wife, Maria McDowell, and their children. He worked in a foundry and glass works and soon owned his own home. A trustee of his Methodist church, he sent one of his sons to Wilberforce University. His obituary described him as “one of the leading citizens of Parkersburg of the older generation.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Coralie Franklin Cook, Brown Colbert’s great-granddaughter, was born in slavery and became the first descendant of a Monticello slave known to have graduated from college. She was born in Lexington, VA, to Albert and Mary Elizabeth Edmondson Franklin (1829-1917). In 1880, Coralie Franklin graduated from Storer College in Harpers Ferry, WV. From this time, she was widely noted as a powerful public speaker. She taught elocution and English at Storer and then at Howard University.
In 1898 she married George William Cook (1855-1931), a Howard University professor and trustee. Coralie Cook served for twelve years as a member of the District of Columbia Board of Education. She was a founder of the National Association of Colored Women and a committed suffragist. About 1910, the Cooks became followers of the Baha’i faith. A longtime friend and admirer of Susan B. Anthony, she eventually became disillusioned by the women’s suffrage movement, feeling it had “turned its back on the woman of color.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
William Cunningham, who worked for many years for the Meade Corporation, was living at the time of his interview in the house in which he was born, across the street from the house lived in by his great-grandparents Tucker and Ann-Elizabeth Isaacs. He participated in the Getting Word project to honor his mother, Ann Elizabeth Isaacs Cunningham, who attended Boston Music School and was a church organist. He and his wife, Mae Catherine Wingo, raised six children. When asked how he felt about Thomas Jefferson, he replied “I would like to know more about Mary Hemings than hear all the talk about him.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Ellen Dammond, who was a social worker and personnel supervisor, was descended from both the Fossetts of Monticello and the famous fugitive slaves William and Ellen Craft. The prominent equal rights activist William Monroe Trotter was her uncle. She felt strongly about preserving and passing on the history of the struggles for freedom and equality, and introduced a 1970s film on the Crafts. Both she and her daughter, Peggy Preacely, were active participants in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Ellen Dammond worked with Dorothy Height and Polly Cowan in the Wednesdays in Mississippi project. The 2006 Getting Word interview includes a 1995 recording of Ellen Dammond and her sister, Virginia Craft Rose, remembering their family and its history.
The William and Ellen Craft Story
Find out about the Craft ancestors, William and Ellen, an enslaved couple from Macon, Georgia, who made a daring escape to freedom.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
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.
Like the other members of the Hughes family with whom she was interviewed in 1996, Angela Hughes Davidson only recently discovered her family’s connection to Monticello through her ancestor Wormley Hughes. Angela was born in Washington, D.C. and graduated from Howard University.
