Sally Hemings was three-quarters white and a half-sister of Jefferson's late wife, Martha Wayles Skelton.
In Charlottesville, Eston married Julia Ann Isaacs, a mixed-race daughter of a wealthy Jewish merchant, David Isaacs from Germany, and Nancy West, a free woman of color, who built an independent bakery business in the town.
After his mother Sally died, Eston and Julia Ann Hemings moved their family to Chillicothe in the free state of Ohio, where they settled for more than 15 years.
The town had a thriving free black community and strong abolitionist activists, who together helped fugitive slaves along the Underground Railroad.
In 1852, after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act increased the danger to members of the African-American community as slave catchers came to Ohio, as they sometimes kidnapped free blacks to sell them into slavery, the family moved north to Madison, Wisconsin,[1] the state capital.
Before the Civil War, John W. Jefferson operated the American House hotel in Madison, Wisconsin, where he brought on his younger brother Beverly to help and learn the business.
In 1902, a former neighbor from Chillicothe recalled John Jefferson's concerns about his mixed ancestry in the social climate of the times: ... and I saw and talked with one of the sons, during the Civil War, who was then wearing the silver leaves of a lieutenant colonel, and in command of a fine regiment of white men from a north-western state.
Articles under his name in the Memphis Daily Avalanche cover such matters as improving streets, enlarging the city's boundaries, and preventing cotton-warehouse fires.
Fawn McKay Brodie and Annette Gordon-Reed presented new analyses that assessed the historiography, showing evidence that other historians had overlooked.
(As Thomas Jefferson had no acknowledged male descendants, another from his line had to be tested, but Y-DNA was passed unchanged.
For most historians, this data, together with the weight of historical evidence, confirmed the Hemings family's claim of descent from Thomas Jefferson.