The Lost Descendants of Thomas Jefferson

New Yorker: “America’s longest-running paternity dispute has seemingly come to an end: Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, his enslaved chambermaid, and the Smithsonian has the DNA to prove it.”

“Richard Kurin, a fifty-year veteran of the institution, launched a top-secret study of the question in 2011. Starting with a few hair samples, he and a team of scientists sequenced Jefferson’s genome and compared it with those of Hemings’s descendants, after a sprawling effort that involved everything from compiling genealogies to scouring rural Virginia for a lost grave.”