I am also a 5th cousin 9x removed to Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson through the same Great Grandmother and her mother who was an Eppes. In 1830, Eston Hemings purchased property and built a house on Main Street, where his mother lived with him until her death in 1835. I saw that struggle first hand from the sidelines as a child. John Wayles Jefferson, the oldest child of Eston Hemings and Julia Isaacs Jefferson, lived as an African American in southern Ohio until the age of fifteen, when his family moved to Madison, Wisconsin, changed their surname from Hemings to Jefferson, and thereafter lived as white people. [2] Sally Hemings is believed to be the half-sister of Thomas Jefferson's wife Martha; her mother was Elizabeth Hemings, a mixed-race slave, and her father was John Wayles, also Martha's father. Harriet Hemings, rumored to be the daughter of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, one of his black slaves, struggles with the problems facing her--to escape from the velvet cage that is Monticello, or to stay, and thus remain a slave. Among the Second Series of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, this volume has the most detailed coverage of his day-to-day life. I wrote a review of it for a college American history class in 1978. "Carmen Gillespie's The Ghosts of Monticello: A Recitatif interrupts the everyday to bring us the spiritual visitations of Sally Hemings, her half-sister Martha Wayles Jefferson, and other famed and forgotten residents of the Monticello ), Madison and Eston were freed in 1827, in accordance with President Jefferson's will. Colonel John Wayles Jefferson the eldest son of Easton Hemings (via Wikimedia Commons) The first encounter between Jefferson and 16-year-old Sally was believed to have happened after 1787, when Sally accompanied Jefferson's youngest daughter to Paris where a widowed Jefferson was serving as minister to France. This would make Sally Hemings 3/4 European White and 1/4 African American and John Wayles' "white" daughter, Martha Wayles, with his wife Martha Eppes Wayles, Sally's half sister. . Not only did John Wayles have two wives, he also "took liberties" with one of his slaves, Elizabeth "Betty" Hemmings. Not sure things have changed that much since Jefferson's time or even Lincoln's time or even Martin Luther King's time. Eston and Julia Ann Hemings had three children: John Wayles Jefferson (1835-1892), Anne Wayles Jefferson (1836-1866), and Beverly Frederick Jefferson (1838-1908). Sally Hemings Program Note. // -->