Herb,
You are committing the sin that you accuse others of ... lots of maybes in
your remark, none of which you can prove. You can't even prove that there
was a red-headed slave on the property. A name doesn't establish any fact
whatsoever. You seem anxious to jump on almost anything that could be made
into an excuse for Jefferson's paternity.
Anne
Anne Pemberton
[log in to unmask]
http://www.erols.com/apembert
http://www.educationalsynthesis.org
----- Original Message -----
From: "Herbert Barger" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2008 11:15 AM
Subject: Re: New Presidential Descendant Claimant
Mr Corneliussen is absolutely correct that it is "possible" that a slave
inherited from Peter Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson's father) could have
carried the Jefferson DNA from past Jefferson males. This slave's name was
"SANDY", a name that denotes reddish hair, and this man could have fathered
a male heir who "may" have been a father to some of Sally's children. Please
remember that only ONE Hemings family member was DNA tested.
Herb Barger
Jefferson Family Historian
-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Steven T. Corneliussen
Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2008 7:32 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] New Presidential Descendant Claimant
And please forgive me if I'm misinterpreting something related from Kevin
Hardwick's Oct. 12 revised list of the things that we can "say about Sally
Hemings that no one is likely to dispute." Item 5 on that revised list
says that the "father of one of [SH's] children -- Eston Hemings -- was
descended from Thomas Jefferson's paternal grandfather; that is to say, we
can narrow the list of possible fathers for this child to Thomas
Jefferson, TJ's brother, his paternal uncles, and his paternal cousins."
It seems to me that, at a minimum, this phrasing fails to make completely
clear what is known about the radius of the circle of paternity
candidates. That complete clarity is important because many participants
in Hemings-TJ discussions, and almost all participants in the media,
presume that the circle includes only Jeffersons who were routinely
acknowledged at the time as members of the extended Jefferson family. In
my view it's important to stipulate specifically the possibility of
paternity by some unknown carrier of the Jefferson DNA marker within the
enslaved population. We know that the DNA marker crossed the race line. We
do not know whether it crossed the race line in a generation earlier than
the one that produced Eston Hemings. Now, this may well be an outlandish
possibility in terms of the historical evidence. But because the DNA
evidence says nothing whatsoever about it, as a matter of DNA science the
circle of paternity candidates must actually be defined as wider than the
circle of males in the known, acknowledged, extended Jefferson family. As
a matter of DNA science, we simply do not know the radius of the circle of
paternity candidates. (And yes, here I have repeated myself nearly
verbatim, but in this case it seemed necessary.)
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