When Julia Jefferson Westerinen, AS '55, was taking history courses at UD in the early '50s, she had no idea the story of one of the country's founding fathers was her story as well.
Back then, Westerinen assumed, as her family had for generations, that her relationship to Thomas Jefferson was distant and that she was related to him through one of his uncles.
All of that changed in 1974, when historian Fawn Brodie published her book, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. In the book, Brodie detailed Jefferson's relationship with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, and theorized that Jefferson had fathered seven children with her over the course of a 38-year relationship. That would make Westerinen a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson and, even more surprising, would mean that her traditionally white family had African-American roots.
The theory was proved scientifically just months ago when pathologist Eugene Foster took samples of blood from known descendants of Jefferson and of Hemings and sent them to Europe for analysis. A DNA sample from Westerinen's brother, John Jefferson, showed 19 chromosome markers that were identical to those of the direct Jefferson descendants. Foster's conclusions, published in the British science journal Nature, confirmed Westerinen's relationship to Jefferson, and her life was thus forever changed.
She is, indeed, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Eston Hemings, the youngest son of Sally Hemings, and, it appears, Thomas Jefferson.
"I think it's great," Westerinen , who makes her living as an artist and runs an all-female office furnishing business, says of her newly discovered heritage. "It's a wonderfully American thing to be descended from a president. And, my relatives-through Sally Hemings-literally built Monticello, and in spite of the tragedy of slavery, they endured."
The discovery of her heritage has brought Westerinen more than the usual 15 minutes of fame. It's also brought her a large, new extended family.
"U.S. News & World Report broke the story. They called and did an interview, but the story was embargoed until the Nature journal came out. Once the story was out, the rest [of the media] fell like kingpins. By that evening, there was a limo at the door to take us to the studio to tape the CBS Morning Show. I stayed home from work the next day to watch it, and the phone started to ring," Westerinen says.
"I had six TV crews in my house that day and was still being interviewed live at 10 p.m. that night. We did Good Morning America and the Today show. Time magazine, People and U.S. News all came to the house to do photo shoots that lasted about three hours each. In the next two weeks, eight newspapers sent interviewers and photographers, and we were on at least a half dozen live radio shows, including one from the country of Colombia. It began to seem as if my call waiting had call waiting."
Then, of course, there was the appearance on Oprah!, where Westerinen met members of her new extended family-black and white-for the first time. One of Westerinen's four children appeared with her.
Lucian Truscott of Los Angeles, a great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Jefferson, embraced his new family and invited them to a meeting of the Monticello Association this May. The association is composed of Jefferson descendants and decides, among other things, who can and can't be buried in the family cemetery located on the grounds of Jefferson's home.
Shay Banks-Young of Columbus, Ohio, whose family's oral history makes her a great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Jefferson through Sally Heming's son, Madison, also appeared on the Oprah! show. Banks-Young's lineage cannot be proven through DNA testing since there is no direct line of male descendants from Madison Hemings as there is for the descendants of Eston.
Westerinen said she is happy to embrace both sides of the family and has grown close to Banks-Young, hosting her on a visit to New York, where the new cousins took in the stage show, Tom & Sally, and afterward participated in a panel discussion.
The two have joined the college lecture circuit and make joint appearances "opening up a dialog within the races, through their presentation, 'Conversations In Black and White,'" Westerinen says.
"Neither blacks nor whites really know what the other is thinking. We don't know each other on a really honest basis. I've always had black friends, but we never talked about race together because it wasn't polite. I hope my experience can be used as a learning experience for other people. I'm so very lucky to have this opportunity. I hope I can live up to it," she says.
Since her story has become public, Westerinen, who met her husband Emil Westerinen, CHEP '63M, at UD, has heard from some UD acquaintances for the first time in 42 years. Emil, whose father came to this country from Finland when he was 17, didn't know any of his extended family on his father's side until the Jefferson news broke.
"Now the Finns have called us. We've been in four Finnish newspapers and are planning to get together soon," Westerinen says.
As for her ideas on Tom and Sally, Westerinen will tell you that John Munroe, H. Rodney Sharp Professor Emeritus of History, taught her long ago that historians should not speculate.
"I was on a television show with an historian who said, 'Thomas Jefferson walked by his slave quarters thinking magnificent thoughts.' I told him that I had been a history major, and that history majors never say 'he thought this way' because one doesn't even know what one's neighbors think, much less historical figures.
"I hope Jefferson's relationship with Sally was satisfactory. I hope it was loving. They were together for 38 years; she was his wife's half sister; she spoke fluent French; she managed Monticello when his daughter was away; she must have been brilliant, but he owned her. She had to do what he said."
For his part, Sally's son, Eston, (1808-1856), one of only five enslaved men freed in Thomas Jefferson's will, was trained as a carpenter at Monticello by his uncle, master joiner John Hemings. After Jefferson's death, he and his brother Madison bought property and lived in Charlottesville with their mother, until her death 10 years later.
Eston then moved with his wife, Julia Ann Isaacs, to Chillicothe, Ohio, where he was a professional musician and had a popular dance band. After 1850, he moved with his family to Wisconsin, where he changed his name and his racial identity.
Westerinen says a search through the family tree in the 1930s probably revealed the family's link to Hemings, but it was never acknowledged. As her daughter, Dorothy Jefferson Westerinen, wrote in the Boston Globe, "My mother and our family had not known the exact nature of our lineage because relatives of mine, after having researched and affirmed their genealogy in the 1930s, decided to obfuscate the truth. We believe they knew of the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings, and, when the paperwork supported the oral history, they covered it up."
By embracing the truth, Westerinen said she hopes to make up for her family's denial. She agrees with Annette Gordon-Reed, professor at New York University Law School, whose book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, An American Controversy, was published last year. In a recent television appearance, Gordon-Reed said, "I think the moral of this story is...that we're not two separate people, black and white; we are a people who share a common culture, a common land and it turns out a common blood line...."
"They say nothing good ever came out of slavery," Westerinen says. "Maybe Shay and I can change some of that."
-Beth Thomas
How can the technology of the 1990s determine the paternity of children born almost 200 years ago? Here's a brief synopsis of what's been written about the DNA test used to establish the paternity of the children of Sally Hemings.This genetic study looked at the sex-linked Y chromosome, which passes mostly unchanged from father to son, making it easier to track through generations than DNA from other chromosomes.
Thomas Jefferson had no surviving sons, but his father's brother, Field Jefferson, had sons who lived to adulthood. Five of Field Jefferson's direct-line descendants are alive today and participated in the DNA testing. All of them should have the same Y chromosome DNA as the Y chromosome of Thomas Jefferson.
The testing revealed that Julia Westerinen's brother, John Jefferson, a direct-line descendant of Eston Hemings, also has the same Y chromosome DNA markers as the Jefferson descendants. The fact that both Y chromosome patterns-those from the Jefferson descendants and from Heming's descendant-were shared is deemed rare in the general population.
(Editor's note: This information was compiled from the story "Jefferson Fathered Slave Son" by Kenneth Chang, which can be found on the ABC News web site at <http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/jefferson981031.html>; from a program transcribed on the OnLineNewsHour, which can be found by searching "Jefferson" at the same site, and from an article by Daryl Royster Alex published in the Nov. 8, 1998, New York Times.)