The Descendants of Elizabeth Hemings

Sally Hemings

The youngest surviving daughter of Elizabeth Hemings, Sally Hemings (1773-1835) was lady’s maid to Jefferson’s daughters, and also worked as a chambermaid and seamstress.  She spent two years in Paris, after accompanying nine-year-old Mary Jefferson across the ocean.  According to her son Madison, Sally Hemings began a relationship with Jefferson in Paris and bore him a number of children.  Although she was not freed by the terms of Jefferson's will, she was not among the slaves sold at the 1827 estate auction at Monticello. Jefferson's daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph presumably gave her "her time," that is, freed her unofficially so that she would not be subject to the 1806 Virginia law requiring freed slaves to leave the state within one year. Madison Hemings recalled that after Jefferson's death, he and his brother Eston took their mother to live with them in a rented house in Charlottesville.

Sally Hemings's descendants have passed the account of their ancestry through many generations and recent genetic testing supports their connection to Jefferson. A research report prepared in 2000 by staff of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello, concluded that a DNA study in 1998, "combined with multiple strands of currently available documentary and statistical evidence, indicates a high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings, and that he most likely was the father of all six of Sally Hemings's children appearing in Jefferson's records."

All four of Sally Hemings’s surviving known children became free close to their twenty-first birthdays.  Beverly Hemings and his sister Harriet Hemings were allowed to leave Monticello without pursuit and apparently passed into white society.  Their descendants have not been located. Their brothers Madison Hemings and Eston Hemings remained at Monticello until after Jefferson's death; both were freed in his will.

Madison Hemings (1805-1877) worked as a carpenter at Monticello and pursued the woodworking trade after he became free in 1827. He married a free woman of color, Mary Hughes McCoy. After his mother’s death, he and his wife moved to southern Ohio, where they raised their family and owned a 66-acre farm.  Photographs of two of their nine children survive:

 

 Emma and George Byrd and Family

Emma Byrd Young, daughter of Madison and Mary Hemings’s oldest daughter Sarah Byrd, with her husband George Young
and their children


 
Jack Pettiford
George Pettiford
Ann Medley
William Dalton
The Youngs' descendants include (left to right) Getting Word participants George (Jack) Pettiford (1926-1996), Ann Pettiford Medley, and William Dalton

 

 

Harriet hemmings Butler Spears

 Shay Banks-Young
Fisher Family
 

The Hemingses’ second daughter, Harriet Hemings Butler Spears (1839-1925) (left), lived with her family in Ohio.  Her descendants include Getting Word participants Shay Banks-Young (center) and Clara Lee Fisher (right, with husband David Fisher and sons Zachary and David).