Monticello Association - New Reunions

New Reunions

Based on earlier hostility by members of the Monticello Association, in July 2003 more than 100 Hemings descendants and 12 Association members, who had supported their applications for membership, had their own reunion at Monticello. Dan Jordan, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation which owns and runs the estate, told them, "Welcome home." At that reunion, John Works Sr., a Monticello Association member, said he hoped other Wayles-Jefferson descendants would eventually accept the Hemingses. He said, "Nobody has proof, really, of direct descendancy to Thomas Jefferson. But look around ... everyone is exchanging information and getting to know each other. That's what a family reunion is supposed to be about."

Four years later, 250 Americans descended from Thomas Jefferson through Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson or Sally Hemings met again at Monticello. Organized by descendants of both sides of the family, the reunion was reported as "a small step towards healing". The private Monticello Association denied the crowd's access to the cemetery that weekend out of concern for the grass.

In 2010 the international peace-making organization "Search for Common Ground" honored three Jefferson descendants for "their work to bridge the divide within their family and heal the legacy of slavery." They are Shay Banks-Young, who identifies as African American, and Julie Jefferson Westerinen, who identifies as European American, both descendants of Sally Hemings; and David Works, a Monticello Association member who is descended from Martha Wayles. They have been featured on NPR and in numerous venues across the country in talks about race and the larger Jefferson family.

Shay Banks-Young said her family always talked about where they came from. Julie Jefferson Westerinen first found out about her full heritage after Fawn McKay Brodie's biography of Jefferson was published in 1974. Her family recognized Eston Jefferson's name and discussed the book. Her father and his brothers had stopped telling about the link to Hemings and Jefferson in the 1940s, for fear that their children would be discriminated against. Julie's brother was the Eston Hemings descendant whose DNA matched that of the Jefferson male line. After studying the facts himself, David Works said, "I agreed pretty much with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation conclusion that the simplest and most reasonable explanation was that Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings." The three descendants have organized larger reunions and have started a new association, the "Monticello Community", "for all the descendants of workmen, artisans and slave, free, family, whatever, at Monticello."