Hemings
Eliga Diggs
Through his mother, Minnie Lee Young Diggs, Eliga Diggs is descended from Reuben and Susan Scott, enslaved foreman and domestic servant, brought to northern Alabama by Jefferson’s great-grandson William Stuart Bankhead in 1846. From the age of eight Diggs had to work hard on the family tenant farm, on land rented from Bankhead’s descendants, the Hotchkiss family. He served two years in the U. S. Army, had various construction jobs, and was a control room operator at a paper mill when he retired. He has been active in local civic organizations and once ran for mayor of North Courtland.
Eliga and Doris Owens Diggs have four children, one of whom married professional baseball player Gary Redus. While he didn’t hear stories of the Scotts, he remembers hearing about his great-grandmother Mildred Scott Young, who loved roses: “The roses are still at the old home site there.”
Lester B. Diggs
Lester B. Diggs, who has lived in Courtland his whole life, attended Alabama State University and worked for Reynolds Metals Company. Through his mother, Minnie Lee Young Diggs, he is descended from Reuben and Susan Scott, enslaved foreman and domestic servant, brought to northern Alabama by Jefferson’s great-grandson William Stuart Bankhead in 1846.
Diggs grew up on a farm owned by the Hotchkiss family, who are Bankhead descendants, and he describes cotton cultivation in his interview. He also recalls meeting Martin Luther King in 1956 in Montgomery, shortly after King’s house was fire-bombed.
Bessie Baskerville Dorsey
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.
Nancy Durant Edmonds
George Edmondson
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.”
Noah Aldridge
Wilmetta Cunningham Austin
Lucille Roberts Balthazar
Lucille Balthazar, only three generations removed from Madison Hemings of Monticello, heard of her connection to Jefferson from her father, William Giles Roberts, although he rarely spoke of it. He participated in the family mortuary business and owned a farm northeast of Los Angeles in the Apple Valley, where he had gardens and orchards. Mrs. Balthazar knew her grandmother, Ellen Hemings Roberts, well and loved to go to dinner at her house. Her grandmother “always set the table beautifully….each of us had our silver napkin rings with our name on it.”
Shay Banks-Young
Shay Banks-Young was a radio and TV personality and poet in Columbus, Ohio. After genetic testing in 1998 established a connection between Madison Hemings’s brother Eston and Thomas Jefferson, she went on the Oprah Winfrey show and met Eston’s descendant Julia Jefferson Westerinen. Following that encounter, Banks-Young and Westerinen brought a discussion of racial issues, titled “A Conversation in Black and White,” to audiences around the country.
Mary Hemings Bell
Mary Hemings was Elizabeth Hemings’s oldest child. After the 1774 division of the estate of Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, she was brought with her family to Monticello, where she was a valued household servant. She had six children, the two youngest with white merchant Thomas Bell, who became her common-law husband. Bell purchased Mary Hemings and their children, Robert and Sarah, freed them, and bequeathed them his considerable property.
Jefferson was unwilling to sell Mary Hemings Bell’s older children, Joseph Fossett and Betsy Hemmings, who remained in slavery at Monticello. After Thomas Bell’s death in 1800, Mary—described in one court document as his “relict & widow”—lived with her children and grandchildren in a house on Charlottesville’s main street. She maintained close ties with her still-enslaved relations at Monticello. Her free status and property helped her son Joseph Fossett minimize the fragmenting of his family at the Monticello dispersal sale in 1827.