Word: hemingses
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Their strength lay in the stories, passed from generation to generation. And so when descendants of Thomas Woodson rolled up their sleeves to give blood for DNA testing, they saw it as a chance to affirm their faith--that Thomas was, in fact, a child of Thomas Jefferson and his...
Similar DNA tests, as the world now knows, established that the youngest of Hemings' sons, Eston, was Jefferson's child. Yet amid the intense debate about Jefferson that this discovery has caused, more interesting may be its impact on the Hemings clan itself. The descendants of the two Hemings sons...
The kind of passing that Eston (and two unaccounted-for Hemings children, Beverly and Harriet) did is well known among blacks, most of whom have stories of light-skinned relatives who pretended to be white in order to fare better in society. "It's a way of getting away from...
Because it's a secretive process, the number of white families with black ancestors who passed is hard to estimate, though historians suspect the number is sizable. Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, author of Sweeter the Juice, a book about relatives who passed as white, says she has received 40,000 letters...
Passing is an issue the Hemings descendants have hardly been able to ignore. Diane Redman, a Madison Hemings descendant who lives in Columbus, recalls looking at family pictures from the 1920s, '30s and '40s, with her parents ruefully pointing out relatives who had passed. Indeed, passing is the reason Madison...