These children were three-quarters white, and, following the condition of their mother, they were considered slaves from birth; they were half-siblings to Wayles's daughter, Martha Jefferson.
After Wayles died, the Hemings family and some 120 other slaves were inherited, along with 11,000 acres and £4,000 debt, as part of his estate by his daughter Martha and her husband Thomas Jefferson.
Betty's oldest daughter Mary Hemings became the common-law wife of wealthy merchant Thomas Bell, who purchased her and their two children from Jefferson in 1792 and granted them greater freedoms than other slaves were typically permitted.
His daughter Martha Randolph gave Sally "her time," an informal freedom allowing her to live with her sons during her last decade of life.
According to the oral history of her descendants, Betty was the daughter of a "White captain of an English trading vessel" and "a full-blooded African" mother, making Elizabeth a mulatto.
[5] The place of her birth is uncertain (Hemings said it was Williamsburg[4]), but by 1746 Betty was recorded as the property of Francis Eppes IV of the Bermuda Hundred plantation.
As the historians Philip D. Morgan and Joshua D. Rothman have written, there were numerous such interracial relationships in the Wayles-Hemings-Jefferson families and Albemarle County and Virginia, often with multiple generations repeating the pattern.
[9] The Jeffersons had the Hemings mixed-race children trained as skilled artisans and domestic servants, giving them privileged positions at the plantation.
[23] At the age of 101 [disputed; probably ~92], when living in Baltimore in 1949, Fountain Hughes gave what is believed to be the last surviving recorded interview of a former enslaved person.