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 To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-roots.html