I am one who has greatly benefitted from the use of DNA to add another
layer of information to the information about the Jefferson/Hemings/Wayles
families' relationships.

While I was among the fortunate few on my side -- the Randolph/Eppes
(sometimes mistakenly referred to as the "white Jeffersons") -- of the
family of Thomas Jefferson descendants to have had contact with some of my
Hemings double-half-cousins prior to the DNA study, the contacts were by
accidental acquaintanceship and thus extremely limited in number.

However, due to the DNA study and the subsequent brouhaha, I've had the
opportunity to meet literally hundreds of my cousins I'd not had access to
before and the experience has been warm and rich beyond imagining.

The original post on this thread dealt with the Wayles connection between
my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Martha Wayles (Skelton)
Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a connection that makes the use of
mitochondrial DNA currently useless in further assessing the Thomas
Jefferson connection.  Oddly enough, in the first conversation I had with
the equally-emphatic-as-Mr.-Barger first head of his Thos. Jefferson
Heritage Society, John Works, Jr., some years before the DNA study, we
discussed (or rather, I discussed and he yelled -- on the porch of
Monticello, no less, before I'd even gotten in the door) the issue of the
Hemings and, in an attempt to extricate myself from this rather surprising
scene with what I could only believe then to be a crazy man, I said that,
someday in the not-too-distant future, science might make all the
discussion moot.  Mr. Works, Jr., replied that it would be impossible
because Martha Wayles' and Sally Hemings' children shared a common
ancestor on the Wayles side of the family.  I smiled and said in parting
that science inexorably moves along and thus we would all just have to
wait and see -- then dashed into the security of the crowd inside.  It was
only after the fact of this familial relationship being seen by many in
the Monticello Association as reason enough not to be overtly rude to the
Hemings that Works, Jr., et al began to claim that Sally Hemings was not
the half-aunt of Mr. Jefferson's children with Martha Wayles.

As for the Hemings being willing to produce the other source of DNA to
which Mr. Barger refers, it would come from a grave of an infant in an old
graveyard that might or might not be a Hemings descendant of a line that
does not have an unbroken chain of male descendants.  I'd suppose it would
be more likely that Mr. Jefferson himself would have been more carefully
buried and thus more likely to produce functionally testable DNA, as well
as more useful DNA for sure identification of the descendancy of many, the
Hemings included.

Mind you, I'm not advocating digging up Mr. Jefferson.  The chances of
finding functional DNA are too small for the insult to his bones for
that.  But the utterly rejectable suggestion does beg looking at the
relative rejectability of Mr. Barger's suggestion and the spirit of its
motives, for which, as he is related to me (rather distantly by marriage)
I feel a certain familial embarassment.  Would that could he.

I am left simply positing that the discoveries the study of one's personal
genealogy can produce enhance one's life in direct proportion to the life,
love, and spirit one already possesses and that overreliance on one's
forebears or one's heroes for one's personal sense of self is the
equivalent of trying to hang interesting designer clothes on a ghost.

Sincerely,

Marla Randolph Stevens

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