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Jefferson Heirs Plan Cemetery for Slave’s Kin at Monticello

Thomas Jefferson’s heirs are proposing the creation of a separate cemetery on the grounds of Monticello, Jefferson’s estate in Virginia, for the descendants of Sally Hemings, the slave who may have been the mother of at least one of his children. But they are not ready to let Hemings’s descendants into the family association.

One of those descendants criticized the offer on Friday. “Nothing’s changed in 200 years, has it?” the descendant, Julia Westerinen of New York City, said after learning of the recommendation by the Monticello Association’s membership advisory committee.

Sally Hemings’s descendants have been trying for years to gain official recognition that Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third president and the author of the Declaration of Independence, fathered some of her children. Their argument was bolstered in 1998, when DNA tests found that a male in Jefferson’s family fathered Hemings’s last child, Eston.

A 24-page report by the family committee, however, concluded that there was not enough evidence to prove Eston Hemings’s lineal descent from Jefferson, a strict requirement for admission and for burial in the family plot.

Jefferson’s heirs own only the half-acre family plot at Monticello and could not on their own create a second graveyard on the estate. Instead, they would have to request that the foundation that now owns Monticello, a 6,000-acre plantation near Charlottesville, Va., set aside land for a separate burial ground.

Although the committee said it could not recommend that the Hemingses be included in the Monticello Association, it suggested that the family create an umbrella organization for the slaves and others who built Monticello and allowed Jefferson to accomplish his great deeds.

“We cannot change or reinvent history,” the report says. “We can, however, embrace what we know and assign credit where credit is due or long overdue.”

The new group would be open to anyone who could prove descent from one of the slaves or artisans who worked at the plantation in Jefferson’s life, or anyone who lived on the plantation at that time.

The committee also suggested that the family work with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns Monticello, to explore creating a separate cemetery where those descendants could be buried.

The Monticello Association is to meet on May 4 and 5 in Charlottesville to vote on the proposal.

Some on the white side of the Jefferson family oppose the suggestion, saying the committee went beyond its mandate for reasons of political correctness.

John H. Works Jr., president of the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, mailed a newsletter to the family association’s more than 700 members, complaining that the lines between the two cemeteries “would blur” over time and lead to “a graveyard of Jefferson’s descendants, both real and imagined.”

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