Although Jefferson's papers contain no record of a child born to Sally Hemings before 1795, the family history of the descendants of Thomas C. and Jemima Woodson, passed down orally, states that Woodson (1790-1879) was the oldest son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. According to that oral tradition, he left Monticello while still a child and lived on the plantation of a kinsman of Jefferson named Woodson, whose surname he adopted. The first documentary reference to Thomas C. Woodson is in an 1820 census of Greenbrier County, Virginia (now West Virginia). By the next year the Woodsons had moved to Ohio, where they founded a rural black community, in which religion and education were of primary importance. For more information on the Woodson family, see "The Ties That Bind."

 

Lewis Woodson's granddaughter Caroline
McGuire Wiley, her husband Thomas Wiley,
and son James Garfield Wiley

 

 

James G. Wiley's son Col. James T. Wiley

 

 

The 1914-15 Wilberforce University basketball team,
with Thomas Woodson's great-grandson
Karl Franklin Smith at center

 

 

Karl F. Smith's twin sons, Ronald and Robert Smith

 

John Penn Woodson, grandson of Thomas and
Jemima Woodson, with his daughters and granddaughters

 

  

Jane Aileen Floyd, granddaughter
of John Penn Woodson

 

 

Minerva Woodson (1851-1926), granddaughter of
Thomas and Jemima Woodson

 

 

Minerva Woodson, her brother Benjamin F. Woodson,
and their extended family

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