Sorry, Anne, but your admittance that you do  not do your own research gave
you away.  Any teacher worth beans should have learned how to search for the
truth before presenting things as facts to students.  If you are getting all
your "facts" from others without doing  meaningful research seeking
verification,  that's a sign of lazy-brain, and how you can hope to instill
an eagerness and curiosity in student  to learn more is beyond logic. You
probably won't know what I'm talking about, but trained researchers will.

 Speaking of logic: did you take a good look at that sentence you wrote re.
TJ's possible parenthood?  "... but an absence of evidence that he did NOT
father those children, coupled with the DNA evidence that A Jefferson
did..." etc.  Come on, girl, get real.  Start with examining the DNA
evidence available so far... no, wait.  Start with becoming more familiar
with what DNA will and will not prove.

In case you are feeling picked on, know that while I do suspect TJ OR his
brother may have fathered some of the Hemings children, to date, there is
absolutely no proof that it's true.  No opinions or guesswork is going to
take the place of solid evidence, and so far there just isn't any.   What's
called for are open minds by logical researchers who know good evidence when
and if they see it.

--Tom Gilmore

On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Anne Pemberton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Kathleen,
>
> Your post is an example of why such heated arguments prevail on the list.
> It is obvious that I did not remember what you wrote between the time I read
> it and when the story came to mind. No one is saying that an absence of DNA
> evidence proves paternity, but an absence of evidence that he did NOT father
> those children, coupled with the DNA evidence that A Jefferson did - at
> least one - gives credence to the oral history that Thomas was the father of
> some or all of Sally's children. All of them were too light to have been
> fathered by a black man, that is why some of them "escaped" and blended into
> the white populations in DC and Baltimore (or wherever the did end up).
>
> The last part of Kathleen's note was extremely offensive. If she really
> wants to find out what kind of teacher I was/am, she can go to the website
> that is listed on the last line of my signature file and collect hundreds of
> pages of "evidence" that are more telling than her smarmy comment.
>
> Anne
>
>
>
> Anne Pemberton
> [log in to unmask]
> http://www.erols.com/apembert
> http://www.educationalsynthesis.org
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Kathleen Much" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Sunday, October 05, 2008 3:38 PM
> Subject: Re: oral history
>
>
>  ----
>> Obviously Anne did not understand what I wrote.
>>
> It is even sillier to say that
>
>> an absence of buttons could verify the claim. [Taking us back to
>> Hemings/Jefferson, where an absence of DNA evidence is being used to make
>> a
>> claim that Thomas Jefferson fathered any or all of Sally Hemings's
>> children.]
>>
>> If Anne's leaps to false conclusions are evidence of her teaching skills,
>> I
>> am glad my children are past an age when they might have been subjected to
>> her ministrations. I  hope that she merely read too hastily and drew
>> faulty
>> conclusions.
>>
>> Kathleen Much
>> The Book Doctor
>>
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