Minnie Shumate Woodson was a nice lady. I spoke to her many times on the telephone and exchanged letters with her. This was before email existed. She was a meticulous researcher and made many great discoveries. Genealogy owes her many great debts.However, she was trying to prove a theory that was unprovible because it was just wrong. Her theory was that the ancestor of her husband, Tom Woodson, was the same person as the “high Yellow” Tom described by James Thompson Callender.In order to prove this she had to explain away several problems with her theory. One problem concerned the fact that Sally Hemings was pregnant in 1789 when she arrived in Virginia after spending three years in France. This means that her child must have been born in 1789 or in 1790.However, Tom Woodson married Jemima in Greenbriar in what is now West Virginia. Jemima had been born in 1783. Their first child was born in Greenbriar County, Virginia (now West Virginia) in 1806. So, Tom was 16 and his wife Jemima was 23 when the child was born. It is unusual for a woman to marry such a young boy.Remember that it cannot be that somebody other than Tom was the father of Jemina's baby because then Thomas Jefferson would not have been the father of them at all.I explain these points on pages 100, 101 and 105 of my book The Slave Children of Thomas Jefferson.Minnie Shumate Woodson's 1987 book is “The Sable Curtain”. This title is based on the statement by muckraker James Thompson Callender that Tom, the son of a “wrench named Sally”, bore “An exact sable likeness to Thomas Jefferson.”Judith Price Justus self-published her book in 1991 entitled *Down from the Mountain: The Oral History of the Hemings Family, Are They the Black Descendants of Thomas Jefferson* Both of these women did a lot of work and made important discoveries, which I used in my own subsequent book “The Slave Children of Thomas Jefferson”.However, her theory that Tom had been “sent away” to the farm of Drury Woodson to hide the fact that he was Thomas Jefferson's son does not make sense. Thomas Jefferson never sent anyone away. He was also inviting more people. Moreover if he was going to send anybody away it would have been Sally herself. The fact that he never sent her away but retained her as a house slave inside Montecello until his death in 1826 and that he provided for her in his will and she was at his bedside when he died shows that he had a special relationship with Sally.Nevertheless, the descendants of Tom Woodson continue to insist that Thomas Jefferson was his father. They write books about this and even a member of this group is insisting that sometimes mistakes are made and DNA samples are contaminated.That is why I would like the whole batch of people re-tested and the results posted here so we can all read and research them.Sam Sloan On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 11:17 AM, Finding Roots via < genealogy-dna@rootsweb.com> wrote: > > > > Hi Sam, > > > > I created the Hemings/Jefferson atDNA Project and took over both surname > > projects at FTDNA after discovering that my brother-in-law is a direct > > descendant. (Shannon Christmas is my co-admin.) I asked a descendant to > > test and I now have the Jefferson Y-DNA haplotype out to 111 markers. > This > > is the only one of which I am aware. We are continuing work on the > subject > > using atDNA, but it is slow going, mostly because of my busy schedule. > > > > Marleen, multiple different lines of descent from Thomas Woodman were > > tested and none matched the Jefferson Y-DNA haplotype, so he cannot be > > the son of Thomas Jefferson. > > > CeCe > > > > > > > > > Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2015 09:59:51 -0700 > > From: Marleen Van Horne <msvnhrn@jps.net> > > Subject: Re: [DNA] Have new DNA tests been one on the Thomas Jefferson > > > > > > ...snip > > > > The fact that the descendant of Thomas Woodson did not match the > > Jefferson yDNA does not mean Woodson was not Jefferson's son, it just > > means the line of descent was contaminated by stranger yDNA between the > > life of Woodson and the testing of the Woodson descendant. > > > > ...snip > > > > Marleen Van Horne > > > > > > > > > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > GENEALOGY-DNA-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without > the quotes in the subject and the body of the message >

If you are able to get them to retest, we would love to have them join the Jefferson/Hemings DNA Project. CeCe On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 4:02 PM, Sam Sloan <samhsloan@gmail.com> wrote: > Minnie Shumate Woodson was a nice lady. I spoke to her many times on the telephone and exchanged letters with her. This was before email existed. She was a meticulous researcher and made many great discoveries. Genealogy owes her many great debts.However, she was trying to prove a theory that was unprovible because it was just wrong. Her theory was that the ancestor of her husband, Tom Woodson, was the same person as the “high Yellow” Tom described by James Thompson Callender.In order to prove this she had to explain away several problems with her theory. One problem concerned the fact that Sally Hemings was pregnant in 1789 when she arrived in Virginia after spending three years in France. This means that her child must have been born in 1789 or in 1790.However, Tom Woodson married Jemima in Greenbriar in what is now West Virginia. Jemima had been born in 1783. Their first child was born in Greenbriar County, Virginia (now West Virginia) in 1806. So, Tom was 16 and his wife Jemima was 23 when the child was born. It is unusual for a woman to marry such a young boy.Remember that it cannot be that somebody other than Tom was the father of Jemina's baby because then Thomas Jefferson would not have been the father of them at all.I explain these points on pages 100, 101 and 105 of my book The Slave Children of Thomas Jefferson.Minnie Shumate Woodson's 1987 book is “The Sable Curtain”. This title is based on the statement by muckraker James Thompson Callender that Tom, the son of a “wrench named Sally”, bore “An exact sable likeness to Thomas Jefferson.”Judith Price Justus self-published her book in 1991 entitled *Down from the Mountain: The Oral History of the Hemings Family, Are They the Black Descendants of Thomas Jefferson* Both of these women did a lot of work and made important discoveries, which I used in my own subsequent book “The Slave Children of Thomas Jefferson”.However, her theory that Tom had been “sent away” to the farm of Drury Woodson to hide the fact that he was Thomas Jefferson's son does not make sense. Thomas Jefferson never sent anyone away. He was also inviting more people. Moreover if he was going to send anybody away it would have been Sally herself. The fact that he never sent her away but retained her as a house slave inside Montecello until his death in 1826 and that he provided for her in his will and she was at his bedside when he died shows that he had a special relationship with Sally.Nevertheless, the descendants of Tom Woodson continue to insist that Thomas Jefferson was his father. They write books about this and even a member of this group is insisting that sometimes mistakes are made and DNA samples are contaminated.That is why I would like the whole batch of people re-tested and the results posted here so we can all read and research them.Sam Sloan > > > On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 11:17 AM, Finding Roots via < > genealogy-dna@rootsweb.com> wrote: > >> > >> > Hi Sam, >> > >> > I created the Hemings/Jefferson atDNA Project and took over both surname >> > projects at FTDNA after discovering that my brother-in-law is a direct >> > descendant. (Shannon Christmas is my co-admin.) I asked a descendant to >> > test and I now have the Jefferson Y-DNA haplotype out to 111 markers. >> This >> > is the only one of which I am aware. We are continuing work on the >> subject >> > using atDNA, but it is slow going, mostly because of my busy schedule. >> > >> >> Marleen, multiple different lines of descent from Thomas Woodman were >> > tested and none matched the Jefferson Y-DNA haplotype, so he cannot be >> > the son of Thomas Jefferson. >> > >> CeCe >> > >> >> >> >> > >> > Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2015 09:59:51 -0700 >> > From: Marleen Van Horne <msvnhrn@jps.net> >> > Subject: Re: [DNA] Have new DNA tests been one on the Thomas Jefferson >> > >> > >> > ...snip >> > >> > The fact that the descendant of Thomas Woodson did not match the >> > Jefferson yDNA does not mean Woodson was not Jefferson's son, it just >> > means the line of descent was contaminated by stranger yDNA between the >> > life of Woodson and the testing of the Woodson descendant. >> > >> > ...snip >> > >> > Marleen Van Horne >> > >> > >> > >> > >> >> ------------------------------- >> To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to >> GENEALOGY-DNA-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without >> the quotes in the subject and the body of the message >> > >