A family inherited
Sally Hemings was born in about 1773, the daughter of the enslaved Elizabeth Hemings and her enslaver, John Wayles, which made her the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, Martha. The Jeffersons inherited the Hemings family from Wayles’s estate in 1774. In 1787, at about 14, Sally Hemings went to Paris as a companion to Jefferson’s daughter Polly and returned with Jefferson in 1789.
Her children
Sally Hemings had six children; four survived to adulthood: Beverly, Harriet, Madison and Eston. A DNA study in 1998 found a match between the Jefferson male line and a descendant of Eston Hemings, and in 2000 a Thomas Jefferson Foundation report concluded that Jefferson was Eston’s father and most likely the father of all her children.
Freedom
Her four surviving children all gained their freedom, Madison and Eston under Jefferson’s will. Sally Hemings herself was never formally freed; after Jefferson’s death his daughter Martha Randolph allowed her to leave, and she lived with her sons in Charlottesville until her death in 1835.



