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Cutting-edge DNA tests on Thomas Jefferson’s hair have provided “extraordinary proof” he sired children with slave Sally Hemings — and the process bizarrely also helped nail serial killers such as Rex Heuermann.
Researchers at the Smithsonian Institution compared the genome sequence in a few strands of hair from the head of the United States’ third president with DNA samples from 13 people believed to be the living descendants of Jefferson and Hemings, the New York Times reported.
Speculation that Jefferson had children with his slave has swirled since the early 19th century, but now, after 15 years of work, the team of archaeologists, genealogists, molecular geneticists and historians say they have proven the link.
“Other people may have other ideas, and I don’t think there’s necessarily an institution position, but I think it’s compelling. It’s very clear,” Smithsonian scholar Richard Kurin, who led the project, said of the findings while promoting his new book.
“This is a topic of interest to the American people. I didn’t invent this question, and it wasn’t invented by the Smithsonian. It goes back to [Alexander] Hamilton and Jefferson and [John] Adams,” Kurin said, referring to some of the nation’s Founding Fathers.
“If we have evidence, scholarship and science that helps elucidate American history, I think we have a duty to pursue it.”
The groundbreaking techniques used to sequence Jefferson’s entire genome have also now been since used to solve Long Island’s Gilgo Beach murders and those of the infamous Golden State Killer.
“It’s hard to say we ever would have gotten to this place, where all these tools were used to convict the Gilgo Beach serial killer, if it hadn’t been for starting this project,” said Beth Shapiro, an expert in ancient DNA at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Gilgo Beach serial killer Heuermann was done in partly by DNA recovered from a pizza crust he tossed outside his Manhattan architecture office, while Golden State Killer Joseph DeAngelo got nailed with the help of family geneology websites.
The Jefferson gene project was started in 2011 when Kurin was previewing a Smithsonian documentary about Jefferson’s personal Bible, which he created by cutting out passages containing Jesus’ moral teachings and pasting them into a new book.
In the search for any traces of blood that the author of the Declaration of Independence may have left on the pages, Kurin instead found three hairs.
They were examined against a sample obtained from a female-line descendant of Jefferson’s mother and found to not be a match, so that led investigators down another path involving strands from a lock of hair believed to have been clipped from Jefferson’s head as he lay on his deathbed at Monticello in 1826.
That hair proved to be a match and led to the sequencing of Jefferson’s entire genome, using extraordinary new techniques.
Biologists also ran 20,000 simulations of each paternity scenario involving Jefferson, his brother Randolph, who has long been put forward as one of the most likely other candidates to have fathered children with Hemings, and Randolph’s sons.
The odds that Jefferson didn’t father either of Hemings’ sons, Madison or Eston, were less than one in 1,000, the study found.
But the study hasn’t been without controversy.
This month, one Hemings descendant who gave a DNA sample in 2015 asked to withdraw her participation over frustrations that Kurin’s book was appearing before a related article had been published in a scientific journal.
That sample and the related data were destroyed, and the analysis reran without her, the Smithsonian confirmed.
David Miller, a sixth-generation descendant of Jefferson whose mother, Sarah Coachman Miller, provided a DNA sample, said he welcomed the results, which confirmed what he already believed.
His mother died before the results came out, but through the project, Miller was able to connect with his “cousins,” the Hemingses, he said.
“It’s positive the family now hopefully gets the recognition and acknowledgement and acceptance they deserve,” he told the Times.
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