America's longest paternity dispute ends

Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, his enslaved chambermaid. The Smithsonian has DNA proof after a secret study launched in 2011.

The primal scene of American contradiction

Jefferson, America's founding champion of liberty, sexually exploited a teenager while holding her and their children in bondage. The relationship upended both liberal and conservative views.

A sex scandal that sparked novels

Rumors of their affair triggered the first presidential sex scandal and inspired the first novel by an African American author, William Wells Brown's Clotel.

Historians debated for over a century

Most dismissed the story as slander until 1955, when an 1873 interview with Madison Hemings, a Black carpenter claiming to be Jefferson's son, was rediscovered.

DNA study shifted the consensus

In 1998, scientist Eugene Foster published a DNA study showing a Jefferson descendant shared a Y chromosome with Sally Hemings descendants, dramatically changing historians' views.

Pulitzer Prize-winning scholarship

Historian Annette Gordon-Reed published The Hemingses of Monticello in 2008, persuasively arguing that a relationship between Jefferson and Hemings was the only plausible interpretation of available evidence.

Skeptics clung to alternative theories

Some theorized Jefferson's brother might have fathered Hemings's children. Gordon-Reed called this the doctrine of any Jefferson but Thomas, predicting no proof would satisfy diehards.

A secret Smithsonian project begins

Richard Kurin, a fifty-year veteran of the Smithsonian, launched a top-secret study in 2011 starting with hair samples found in Jefferson's Bible.

The jigsaw puzzle of ancient DNA

Sequencing DNA from old hair was nearly impossible because it breaks into very short segments. Kurin explained it like having a three-billion-piece jigsaw puzzle with no edges.

“Imagine having a jigsaw puzzle with three billion pieces, and you need to figure out the edges.”

Ancient DNA specialists crack the code

Richard Green and Beth Shapiro agreed to tackle the problem. They devised a new method to extract and prepare old DNA, enabling them to sequence Jefferson's entire genome.

The Bible hairs weren't Jefferson's

After years of effort, the hair samples from Jefferson's Bible turned out not to be his. Luckily, Monticello provided clippings from his deathbed that were authentic.

Exhuming Randolph Jefferson

To rule out Jefferson's brother as the father, Kurin decided to exhume Randolph's remains. An archaeological survey of thirteen hundred acres found little until new Hemings descendants provided breakthrough DNA.

One descendant's DNA clinches it

A previously untested Hemings descendant shared over five percent of her DNA with Thomas Jefferson, more than any of his legitimate family members tested.

Meeting Margot Kossmann Williams

A developmental biologist at Ohio State University, Williams is one of the newly confirmed Jefferson-Hemings descendants. Her grandmother Dorothy participated in Kurin's study.

A family secret kept for decades

Dottie McKnight suspected her family had a secret from childhood. She shared about three percent of her genome with Jefferson, shocking her just before her death last year.

“I have a lot to process. Guess it means more to me than I'd thought.”

Madison Hemings told the truth

Madison, born into slavery at Monticello, became a carpenter and settled in Ohio in the eighteen-thirties. In 1873, he gave an interview insisting on telling the truth about his family.

A staircase built by Madison survives

In Waverly, Ohio, a building Madison worked on during the Civil War now houses a Mexican restaurant. His handcrafted staircase, with smooth dark wood and graceful curves, remains hidden upstairs.

Scattered DNA, scattered families

Some of Madison's siblings passed as white after Jefferson's death. The DNA fragments used in the study are artifacts of America's founding contradiction, scattered among families across the country.

Science and history confirm the truth

Thanks partly to Madison's courage in telling his story, science and history have now confirmed the truth of his parents. The genome will be posted online to identify other Hemings descendants.