1998 Study shows Thomas Jefferson probably fathered at least one of Sally Hemmings children
Sally Hemings (c.1773 – 1835) was a quadroon slave who may have had one or more children with Thomas Jefferson. Her mother, Betty Hemings, was initially owned by John Wayles, who died in 1773, leaving mostly all of the Hemings family to his daughter Martha Wayles, wife of Thomas Jefferson. Martha and Sally were probably half-sisters, both fathered by John Wayles.
Martha Jefferson died in 1782, and in 1784 Thomas Jefferson took up residence in Paris as American envoy to France. In 1787 Jefferson sent for nine-year-old Mary (Maria) Jefferson to come live with him. Thomas Jefferson asked that Isabel, an older woman, be sent as a companion for Maria, but because Isabel was pregnant, the teen-aged Sally Hemings accompanied her instead. Hemings returned to the United States with Jefferson in 1789 and lived the rest of her life at Monticello or in nearby Charlottesville, where she moved after Jefferson's death. According to Jefferson's records, she bore six children; an additional seventh child is asserted by descendents of Thomas C. Woodson, who claim he was also a child of Hemings, but no documentary evidence exists for this.
Sally Hemings served as chambermaid to Thomas Jefferson. As an adult she lived in a room which was accessible to the Monticello mansion through a covered passageway. Hemings was never officially freed by Thomas Jefferson, perhaps because the laws at that time required freed slaves to leave the state within a year; Jefferson's daughter Martha Randolph probably gave Hemings her "time," a form of unofficial freedom.