Eugene Foster, 81, Pointed Finger at Jefferson

Eugene Foster, 81, Pointed Finger at Jefferson - July 24, 2008 - The New York Sun

Eugene Foster, 81, Pointed Finger at Jefferson

By STEPHEN MILLER, Staff Reporter of the Sun | July 24, 2008
http://www.nysun.com/obituaries/eugene-foster-81-pointed-finger-at-jefferson/82518/

Dr. Eugene Foster, who died July 21 at 81, raised a fuss over presidential progeny that sloshed outside strictly historical circles when he showed through DNA testing that President Jefferson was the likely father of at least one child by one of his slaves, Sally Hemings.

Unschooled as a historian, Foster was a pathologist who worked for many years at the University of Virginia Medical School at Charlottesville, Va., and later Tufts University New England Medical Center at Boston. At the suggestion of a friend who'd become interested in the persistent rumor that Jefferson had fathered children with a slave, Foster analyzed the Y chromosomes of 14 male descendents of Jefferson's close relatives. (Jefferson's only son was stillborn.)

Published by Foster 1998 in the British journal Nature along with seven co-authors, the paper was titled "Jefferson fathered slave's last child." That was Eston Hemings Jefferson, born in 1808, and whose family had a long-standing oral tradition of being descended from the nation's third president.

Many historians have come to feel that several more of Hemings's six children were likely fathered by Jefferson, who historical records indicate was present at Monticello when the children were conceived.

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