Greenport resident Dorothy Westerinen has always known her family was related to Thomas Jefferson — after all, her mother Julia’s family carried the last name Jefferson for generations. But she didn’t know until she was a teenager that her family line goes back to Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved by Jefferson who is believed to have borne seven of his children.
Ms. Westerinen’s family had always identified as white — they trace their family line back to Sally Heming’s youngest son Eston, who had light skin and had chosen to pass as white, while his brother Madison began a family line that has identified as black.
Pictured above: Dorothy Westerinen at home in Greenport this week.
“I was 17 when we found out, and my mother set the tone for it. She thought it was so exciting,” said Ms. Westerinen in an interview with The Beacon this week at her home in Greenport. At the time, she hadn’t heard of Sally Hemings and Hemings’ part in American history was not well known.
“We wanted to know who this person was — we’d never heard of her,” she said. Her family ended up being the subject of much media attention, including a visit to the Oprah Winfrey Show in the late 1990s, where she met some her black cousins for the first time.
“They were just so welcoming and wonderful and hugging us. It was like lost family. Eston moved away from his family, totally, and passed as white,” she said. “So that’s how we ended up being in the white world, and at the Madison’s decided, being in the black world.”
Julia Jefferson, who recently passed away, received a great deal of media attention and did extensive public speaking throughout her life about her family’s Jefferson-Hemings connection, and she contributed a saliva sample to a project organized by Richard Kurin, distinguished scholar and Ambassador-At-Large for the Smithsonian Institution. This work has proven using cutting-edge DNA research that Ms. Westerinen and her many cousins are descended from both Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. That research is documented in Mr. Kurin’s brand new book, “History by a Hair: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings and a 200-Year-Old Mystery.”
Ms. Westerinen, her brother Art and Mr. Kurin will discuss the the project in a special program organized by the North Fork chapter of Coming to the Table this Saturday, Oct. 3 at 4 p.m. at the North Fork Arts Center.
Coming to the Table, a nationwide organization dedicated to racial healing, was borne out of family reunions between descendants of Jefferson and Hemings, and the local chapter is spearheaded in part by Liz Welch, a writer who collaborated with Mr. Kurin on the book.
“When I was first asked to work with Richard, I was surprised that the relationship (between Jefferson and Hemings) was even in question!” said Ms. Welch this week. “I was fascinated to do a deep dive on this story, especially about the controversy that actually inspired the formation of Coming to the Table, and this idea that we are all, truly, family.”
Mr. Kurin said most of his writing in the past has been for fellow academics, and his publisher, Penguin Random House, put him together with Ms. Welch, who served as almost a “reader’s advocate” on the project, helping him to explain the project like a detective story.
The detective story began in 2011, when Smithsonian researchers found a hair in Thomas Jefferson’s personal bible. Modern genome work was still in its infancy, and it was still very difficult to collect genetic material from 200-year-old hairs, especially if they did not include the root.
He began working with Beth Shapiro and Ed Green of the Paleogenomics Lab at the University of California — Santa Cruz, who had done extensive work on the genomes of extinct species and neanderthals.
Their lab has been developing a two part process that involves new ways of extracting DNA out of ancient living materials and biocomputational work, which Mr. Kurin described as like “putting together a jigsaw puzzle with three billion pieces.”
As part of their work, they began collecting saliva samples from living descendants of Jefferson and Hemings, but discovered thanks to a sample from a woman in Florida that the bible hair, in fact, did not belong to Jefferson, but likely belonged to one of his daughters.
“The bible was very stingy in giving up its DNA,” said Mr. Kurin in an interview with The Beacon this week.
But another lock of hair found two years later at Monticello, snipped from Jefferson’s head the day he died, proved to be the key puzzle piece.
“That hair at Monticello, this one very rich hair that was in their inventory, did match the mitochondrial DNA of the lady in Florida,” said Mr. Kurin.
This process has been a bit of a race against the clock — DNA becomes diluted with generations, and can only be used to determine ancestry back about five generations, said Mr. Kurin. His team collected more and more saliva samples, many from people in their 80s and 90s, in order to continue filling in the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle. Anything greater than a 4 percent DNA match is considered very strong evidence, though often brothers and sisters within the same family have differing percentages of shared DNA.
Julia Jefferson was one of the early people to volunteer her DNA, but she did not live to see the results, which showed she had enough of Jefferson’s DNA to prove she was a descendent.
“She would have been thrilled,” said Ms. Westerinen. “She was part of the last generation where you could really make that determination. Richard would call us and update us from time to time, but I was kind of just tangentially involved. She had two-point something percent, but my uncle had about 4 percent Jefferson. That’s huge.”
“I went back to other branches of the Madison Hemmings family, and ended up of finding several descendants that had, 3.7, 4.2, 4.4. 5 percent of Thomas Jefferson’s DNA, which is off the charts,” said Mr. Kurin. “And so we were very, very, certain then that Madison Hemings had been the son of Thomas Jefferson.”
When Ms. Westerinen’s family first learned of their ties to Sally Hemings in the 1970s, they and other families, many from Madison Hemings’ family, approached the Monticello Association, a group of Jefferson’s white descendants, about being included. At that time, she said, members of the association “were very angry and hostile.”
“That was the first time I experienced racism — it was my first taste of it, and I didn’t care for it,” she said. But this year, she said, the foundation has been reaching out to make amends.
“Madison’s family had no DNA evidence. All they had was oral history, which, of course, is not accepted unless you’re white,” she said. “The Monticello Jeffersons didn’t ever have any kind of DNA test done, and but the story was handed down to them and accepted. It’s very hypocritical.”
At Saturday’s event at the North Fork Arts Center, Ms. Westerinen hopes that the conversation will “open people’s minds to the reality that you don’t necessarily know your background. It could be something you don’t realize.”
“I would hope it would be the example of our family coming together, after hundreds of years, and making a family, and of the idea of this country as a family,” she said. “The Monticello people have actually started to reach out, doing phone calls and group meetings and apologizing for the way they reacted.”
Mr. Kurin also hopes to spread this unifying message, on the 250th anniversary of this country’s birth, guided by a quote from Thomas Jefferson, “We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead.”
“It’s a good thing to guide our country and our own lives,” he said. “And of course, you have this, this tremendous paradox in which he’s calling for equality of all people (in the Declaration of Independence)” and yet he’s enslaving someone who gave birth to his children, who were also enslaved. At Sally Heming’s request, Madison and Eston were freed after Jefferson’s death. Her two oldest living children ran away earlier, and their family lineage is not well researched, said Mr. Kurin. Her three other children passed away at a young age.
“This is the evolution of Jefferson’s mission statement for the country — that all men are created equal, and it means really everybody,” said Mr. Kurin. “We’re all free now, and we’re all entitled to that human dignity and those human rights and the rights that Jefferson enunciated for our country that were, I think at the time, aspirational.”
Tickets to the event are $20 and are available on the North Fork Arts Center’s website.
— Beth Young
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