The Smithsonian’s DNA study of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson supports the conclusion that Jefferson fathered children with Hemings. Richard Kurin and a team of scientists launched the top-secret project in 2011, then compared Jefferson’s genome with genomes from Hemings’s descendants.
The work adds another layer to a dispute that had already drawn in genealogies, historical records, and DNA evidence from 1998. It also sits inside a longer argument over Jefferson’s legacy, which the Smithsonian had treated as settled after dedicating an exhibition to Sally Hemings.
Richard Kurin and the 2011 study
Richard Kurin led the Smithsonian effort to sequence Jefferson’s genome and match it against descendants of Hemings. The project was not limited to laboratory work. It also involved compiling genealogies and searching rural Virginia for a lost grave, a step meant to connect the family lines being compared.
The study’s conclusion rested on comparison, not conjecture. Jefferson’s genome was sequenced and placed beside the genomes of Hemings’s descendants, giving the Smithsonian a direct line of evidence on the paternity question that had long depended on biography and inference.
Eugene Foster’s 1998 DNA study
Before the Smithsonian project, Eugene Foster published a DNA study in 1998 showing that a descendant of Sally Hemings shared a Y chromosome with descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Martha Wayles. That result shifted the historical consensus and made the later Smithsonian work part of an already documented scientific record.
The timeline matters because the Jefferson-Hemings question had been debated for more than a century before Foster’s paper. After that, Annette Gordon-Reed wrote The Hemingses of Monticello in 2008. Her book won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and she said, “My ideal was for people to make a decision ‘on the papers,’” when describing how she wanted the dispute judged.
Annette Gordon-Reed and the skeptics
Gordon-Reed also described the older skeptical view as “any Jefferson but Thomas,” a phrase that captured how some readers resisted the evidence. Some skeptics still theorized that Thomas Jefferson’s brother might have impregnated Sally Hemings, even after the DNA findings and the historical scholarship moved the argument toward Jefferson.
The debate has also lived outside academic writing. William Wells Brown wrote Clotel, described as the first novel by an African American, and Maya Rudolph played Sally Hemings opposite Robert De Niro’s Thomas Jefferson in a S.N.L. sketch in 2002. Those references show how deeply the dispute has entered public culture, but the Smithsonian study pushed the discussion back to the same core question: whose DNA matched whose family line.
For readers following the Jefferson-Hemings record, the practical outcome is that the Smithsonian’s study adds institutional weight to the paternity conclusion already supported by Foster’s 1998 work. Which specific hair samples were used in the Smithsonian study and how the sequencing result was validated is not explained.
