Descendants
In the 1970s, Jean Jefferson, unaware of her connection to the Hemings family, read Fawn Brodie's biography, Jefferson: An Intimate Portrait. She recognized Eston Hemings Jefferson's name in the book from family stories and contacted Brodie. The historian helped Jefferson start putting the pieces of the family history back together. They discovered that in the 1940s, her father and his brothers had decided against continued telling of the Hemings-Jefferson story to their children, out of fear the younger people would be discriminated against. The family's new knowledge of their history enabled DNA researchers in 1998 to locate Jean's cousin John Weeks Jefferson, a male descendant of Eston Hemings Jefferson, for testing. His Y-chromosome matched that rare haplotype of the Thomas Jefferson male line.
Read more about this topic: Eston Hemings
Famous quotes containing the word descendants:
“Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is for ever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“We go to great pains to alter life for the happiness of our descendants and our descendants will say as usual: things used to be so much better, life today is worse than it used to be.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“And what if my descendants lose the flower
Through natural declension of the soul,
Through too much business with the passing hour,
Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)