The Jefferson & Hemings Family Trees

I. The Jefferson Family

Grandfather → today · the acknowledged line

• Generation 1 · Grandparents
  Thomas Jefferson II m. Mary Field

  c. 1677 – 1731

  Virginia planter and militia captain, called "Captain Jefferson." (On the mother's side, the grandfather was Isham Randolph, of Virginia's powerful Randolph clan.)
  • Generation 2 · Parents
    Peter Jefferson m. Jane Randolph

    1708 – 1757 · Jane: 1721 – 1776

    Self-taught surveyor and mapmaker of Shadwell. His death left 14-year-old Thomas the land that included the little mountain.
    • Generation 3
      Thomas Jefferson m. Martha Wayles Skelton

      1743 – 1826 · Martha: 1748 – 1782

      Martha was the daughter of John Wayles — which makes her Sally Hemings's half-sister. After Martha's death, Jefferson fathered six more children with Sally (see Tree II).

      Bridge · father in both trees
      • Generation 4 · Six children with Martha — only two reached adulthood
        Martha "Patsy" Randolph m. Thomas Mann Randolph Jr.

        1772 – 1836

        The only child to outlive her father. Mother of twelve; eleven survived — the source of nearly all acknowledged Jefferson descendants.
      • Mary "Polly" Eppes m. John Wayles Eppes

        1778 – 1804

        Died at 25 during her father's presidency, leaving one surviving son.
      • Jane (1774–1775), an unnamed son (1777), Lucy Elizabeth I (1780–1781), and Lucy Elizabeth II (1782–1784) — all died in infancy or early childhood.
      • Generation 5 · Grandchildren
        The Randolph children

        1791 – 1818 (births)

        Patsy's eleven surviving children include Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who managed his grandfather's estate and debts, and Ellen Randolph Coolidge, his favorite letter-writing granddaughter.
      • Francis Wayles Eppes

        1801 – 1881

        Polly's only surviving child; moved to Florida and helped found the school that became Florida State University.
        • Generations 6 → today
          Thousands of living descendants

          19th century – present

          Through Patsy and Polly, Jefferson's acknowledged descendants today number in the thousands. Many belong to the Monticello Association, which maintains the family graveyard at Monticello. Jefferson has no acknowledged descendants carrying the Jefferson surname — his only sons with Martha died as infants.

II. The Hemings Family

Grandparents → today · the unacknowledged line, recorded by Sally's son Madison

• Generation 1 · Sally's grandparents
  An unnamed African woman & Captain Hemings

  early 1700s

  Per Madison Hemings's memoir: his great-grandmother was a "full-blooded African" enslaved woman; his great-grandfather an English sea captain named Hemings, who tried and failed to buy his own daughter's freedom. The African woman's name was never recorded — the first erasure in the family's story.
  • Generation 2 · Sally's mother — and father
    Elizabeth "Betty" Hemings & John Wayles

    Betty: c. 1735 – 1807 · Wayles: 1715 – 1773

    Betty bore twelve children, six of them by her enslaver John Wayles — the same John Wayles whose legitimate daughter Martha married Thomas Jefferson. When Wayles died, Betty, her children, and 100+ others passed to Jefferson as inheritance. Her family at Monticello would grow to 80 people across five generations — the largest family on the mountain.

    Bridge · Wayles fathered Martha AND Sally
    • Generation 3
      Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson

      1773 – 1835

      Enslaved half-sister of Jefferson's late wife — by oral tradition, the dying Martha placed her own hand bell in nine-year-old Sally's hands. Legally free in Paris at sixteen, she returned to Virginia on his promise to free her children. Never formally freed herself; after his death she was given "her time" and lived free in Charlottesville. She bore six of his children.

      Bridge · her children are Jefferson's children
      Her siblings by Wayles — Robert, James (the French-trained chef, freed in 1796; he died free in Baltimore in 1801), Thenia, Critta, and Peter Hemings — plus half-siblings including master carpenter John Hemmings and Burwell Colbert's mother Betty Brown.
      • Generation 4 · Six children with Jefferson — four survived
        Beverly Hemings

        1798 – after 1822

        A carpenter and fiddler, allowed to walk free in 1822; he passed into white society in Washington, D.C. His descendants, if any, are lost to the record — they likely never knew.
      • Harriet Hemings

        1801 – after 1863

        A spinner in her father's textile factory, she left Monticello in 1822 with money for the stagecoach, married a white man, and vanished into white society. Only her brother Madison knew her secret.
      • Madison Hemings m. Mary McCoy

        1805 – 1877

        Freed in Jefferson's will; trained as a carpenter. Moved to Ohio, lived as a Black man, and in 1873 published the memoir naming Jefferson as his father — the family's testimony against a century of denial.
      • Eston Hemings Jefferson m. Julia Ann Isaacs

        1808 – 1856

        Freed in the will; a professional musician in Ohio, he moved to Wisconsin about 1852, took the surname Jefferson, and lived as white.
      • Two more died young: Harriet I (1795–1797) and an unnamed daughter (1799–1800).
      • Generation 5 · Grandchildren
        Madison's children

        1830s – 1840s (births)

        Nine children raised in Ohio; some lived as Black, some crossed the color line — one family, split by America's racial ledger.
      • Eston's children

        1830s – 1840s (births)

        Including John Wayles Jefferson, a Union colonel in the Civil War who begged a friend not to reveal his ancestry. It was this line's Y-chromosome that, in the 1998 DNA study, matched the Jefferson male line — science confirming what Madison had said in 1873.
        • Generations 6 → today
          Living descendants

          19th century – present

          Hundreds today, through Madison and Eston. Publicly known descendants include broadcaster Shannon LaNier and Shay Banks-Young (Madison's line) and Julia Jefferson Westerinen (Eston's line). Since 1999 many have attended reunions at Monticello alongside the Randolph-line descendants — and in the "Getting Word" oral history project, the two branches of the tangled tree finally stand in the same photograph.
        • Beyond Sally's line, her siblings' descendants carried the story forward: William Monroe Trotter (of the Mary Hemings–Fossett line) founded the Boston Guardian in 1901 and co-founded the Niagara Movement, forerunner of the NAACP; Coralie Franklin Cook helped found the National Association of Colored Women; Brown Colbert emigrated to Liberia in 1833; and at least eleven descendants of Monticello's enslaved community fought for the Union in the Civil War — four of Jefferson's own mixed-race grandsons among them, serving as white men.

A note on the present day: living descendants are named here only where they have publicly identified themselves and spoken about their ancestry. Beverly's and Harriet's lines may continue today in families who never learned the story.