CaClark...here's the whole article. I probably should delete it in a few days. A Mysterious Grave Haunts a Town By TINA KELLEY Published: July 2, 2000 A tale of history tinged with mystery caught the attention of the Orange County, N.Y., hamlet of Southfields yesterday, as two amateur historians declared that in their midst (sort of) lay the bones (maybe) of a heretofore unknown descendant of Thomas Jefferson. The local newspaper, The Times Herald-Record of Middletown, announced on its front page yesterday that the historians, Roger A. King of Monroe, N.Y., and Robert Brennan of Pine Bush, N.Y., might have found the younger Jefferson's grave in an old Orange County cemetery. The paper cited the discovery of two pieces of a tombstone, one belonging to a man named Thomas Jefferson who had died in 1855, the other reading ''son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings'' -- the slave long believed to have borne children by him. Mr. King and Mr. Brennan called a news conference to repeat their findings yesterday afternoon at the Red Apple Restaurant, on Route 17 in Southfields. Speaking to about 35 people, over the clatter of cutlery and coffee cups, they described parts of their theory: that Sally Hemings gave birth in 1809 to an eighth child, a son, that she had with Thomas Jefferson. And that the boy, Thomas Jr., was brought north soon afterward to New York, out of slavery, by Elizabeth Monroe, who later became the nation's fifth first lady and who was a friend of Hemings's. An eighth child of Jefferson and his slave mistress, and a New Yorker, at that? Big news, if true: in the long-running debate over whether Jefferson and Hemings had children together, and if so how many, historians usually stop at seven. In 1998, an article in the scientific journal Nature reported that DNA tests provided compelling evidence that Jefferson fathered at least one of Hemings's children. Mr. King and Mr. Brennan presented as evidence two sisters who claimed to be descendants of the newly discovered Thomas Jefferson Jr.. They recalled how one of their uncles had researched the family tree -- then stopped, mysteriously. There were rumors in the family, the women said, that he had discovered the connection between Jefferson and his mistress, and the uncle did not want to know more. Soon after the news conference, a few dozen people, including a handful of reporters and photographers, walked from the restaurant to the John Coffey Jr. Cemetery in Southfields, a small, lumpy knoll with stones in various stages of disrepair. There, they saw the stone that read ''In memory of Thomas Jefferson who died April 25, 1855 Ae 46 Yrs & 12 Ds.'' But the piece of stone identifying him as a son of Jefferson and Hemings was nowhere to be found. The same was true of Mr. King, who was, it turned out, one of the few people around claiming to have actually seen the second half of the gravestone. He had given rubbings of the stone to Mr. Brennan, who has not seen the actual stone, and Chris Sonne, the historian for the town of Tuxedo, who accompanied Mr. King to the graveyard Friday on a fruitless search for the second piece of the stone. After Mr. King left the restaurant for parts unknown, Mr. Sonne said, ''I have every reason to believe it to exist, because you can't fake an etching, but I am really somewhat mystified.'' Jefferson scholars reached by telephone yesterday were not about to jump on the next plane to Orange County. ''I would be the last person to say anything is impossible, but it strikes me as very unlikely,'' said Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor at New York Law School and author of ''Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy'' (University Press of Virginia, 1997). The child, she said, would have to have been conceived a month and a half after Hemings gave birth to her son Eston, and there was no later child listed in Jefferson's farm book, which lists Hemings's other children. Dr. Gordon-Reed said the discovery of the tombstone raises the unlikely possibility of there being three Jefferson sons named Thomas: Thomas Eston, who went by his middle name; the Southfields Thomas; and Thomas Woodson, some of whose descendants claim the relation, though DNA testing has cast doubt on it. There is also the problem of the memoirs of Madison Hemings, whom Dr. Gordon-Reed considers one of the four known children of Jefferson and Hemings (the others were Beverly, Harriet and Eston.) ''He lists his siblings, and Eston, he says, is the last one,'' said Dr. Gordon-Reed, who is now writing a biography of the Hemings family. ''Why wouldn't he know this kid? He would have been somebody he grew up with, just like his other siblings.'' And family tradition claiming descent from the famous couple does not count for much, she added. ''If all the people who claim to be descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings really were,'' Dr. Gordon-Reed said, ''she would have had hundreds of children. ''It may be possible, but there's nothing that indicates if it's true. Right now there's nothing in the documentary record that supports it.'' Joseph J. Ellis, a history professor at Mount Holyoke College and author of ''American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson'' (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997) also said the new claims appeared doubtful. ''Let's listen to what the men have to say, but the historical evidence we do have doesn't seem to take a shape that makes this very likely,'' he said. ''There has never been in any of the record -- either in the written or oral traditions, on the white or black side of the argument that has been going on in the longest-running soap opera in American history -- any previous claim that a child was born after Eston.'' At the news conference, Mr. King said he was unfazed by such questions, which he had expected. ''I don't have a problem with anybody doubting,'' he said. ''That's how the truth will come out.'' Located at: http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F2071EF63E5D0C718CDDAE0894D8404482&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fPeople%2fH%2fHemings%2c%20Sally Anne Anne Pemberton [log in to unmask] http://www.erols.com/apembert http://www.educationalsynthesis.org