I do hope the esteemed members of this list are NOT tired of the Hemings 
story because I am writing a book about Jefferson and his slaves, which will 
have a section on the Hemings family. I have done a lot of new research and 
made some fresh discoveries about Monticello.

Let me try to summarize the story quickly, in a "non-partisan" fashion; and 
those who are not interested can just hit "Delete" right now.

Thomas Jefferson was alleged to be the father of Sally Hemings's children in 
newspaper articles  in 1802 by the political journalist James Callender (who 
had a grudge against Jefferson), in oral histories, in letters, and a diary 
entry. All this evidence has been subject to dispute for two hundred years 
and continues to be debated.

In the 1850s, Jefferson's grandchildren Ellen Randolph Coolidge and Thomas 
Jefferson Randolph admitted privately that Hemings had children who closely 
resembled Thomas Jefferson, but they said the reason for the resemblance was 
that the children had been fathered by Jefferson's nephews Peter and Samuel 
Carr, the sons of his sister.

In the late 1990s Dr. Eugene Foster, with the invaluable aid of Herbert 
Barger, obtained blood samples for DNA testing from male-line descendants of 
Field Jefferson, an uncle of Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson himself had 
no surviving legitimate male children. On the Hemings side, Foster obtained 
samples from a male-line descendant of Eston Hemings, the youngest son of 
Sally Hemings.  These two lines of DNA matched, proving that Eston Hemings 
had been fathered not by a Carr but by some male of the Jefferson family. 
 After analyzing the historical evidence, Monticello's scholars concluded 
that Thomas Jefferson was the most likely member of his family to have 
fathered Eston and that Thomas Jefferson was very likely the father of all 
of Sally Hemings's children.

That would seem to be the end of the story, except that a number of 
researchers, notably including Herbert Barger, Cynthia Burton, and Rebecca 
McMurry, raise the possibility that Eston's father could have been TJ's 
brother Randolph or some other Jefferson. The Monticello scholars, and 
others, think this is unlikely, but the debate continues.

Herbert Barger has proposed trying to get a DNA sample from the remains of 
another Hemings who is buried in Kansas, the son of Madison Hemings. 
 Madison was Eston's brother.  The living Hemings descendants have not 
granted permission.

According to Jefferson's plantation records, Sally Hemings had one daughter 
and three sons who survived (Harriet and Beverly, who were allowed to leave 
Monticello in 1822; and Madison and Eston, who were freed in Jefferson's 
will).  But according to oral history and other documentation, there was 
another son--the first-born "President Tom," made notorious by James 
Callender's articles. According to an oral history, this Tom was whisked 
away from Monticello in the wake of the scandalous press reports and given a 
new identity as Thomas Woodson.

Today's Woodson family is descended from an actual Thomas Woodson, who died 
in 1879 in Ohio and whose birth date is not known.  His descendants have 
long claimed that he was the son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. 
 They claim he was conceived when Jefferson and Hemings were in France and 
was born at Monticello in 1790.  Nothing in Jefferson's Farm Book or other 
Monticello records verifies Woodson's birth or presence at Monticello. 
Foster's test showed no match between the DNA of Jefferson's family and 
Woodson's descendants.

In the interest of brevity I have left out a lot, but I think that's a fair 
gist of the story in a very small nutshell.

Henry Wiencek
Charlottesville