A Jefferson Descendant Emerges In Issaquah

SAMMAMISH PLATEAU

All his life, Jeff Westerinen has heard family stories about his direct lineage from Thomas Jefferson and one of Jefferson's slaves, Sally Hemings.

So when the Sammamish Plateau man heard Friday about genetic evidence that made these stories an almost certain reality, his immediate reaction was not so dramatic:

"We went out and got costumes" for a Halloween party, he said. He and his wife dressed up like Jefferson and Hemings, most likely his great-great-great-great-grandparents.

According to a finding published this week in the journal Nature, Jefferson almost certainly fathered Hemings' youngest son, Eston.

"DNA validated our family folklore," Westerinen said. "It's not every day that happens."

Historians, scientists and pundits around the world are surprised at the discovery. Even historians who believed the pair had a child commonly thought it was Thomas Woodson. While the Thomas Woodson Family Association numbers 1,400, Westerinen says Eston has 14 direct descendants living.

Among those are Westerinen, 42, his 5-year-old daughter, two brothers, a sister and mother, who taught her children with pride of the ancestry that had been taboo for her mother's generation.

She named Westerinen William Jefferson, in honor of the lineage, and "was always very careful to say it was a loving relationship," Westerinen says. Along with Finnish, Scottish and Irish, the Microsoft program manager and Maryland native says he has always considered himself part African-American.

In the study conceived by Eugene Foster, emeritus professor of pathology at Tufts University in Boston, DNA from Westerinen's uncle was compared to that of known descendants of Jefferson's paternal uncle. In it, researchers looked at markers on the Y chromosome, which is passed virtually unchanged from father to son.

Researchers say historical evidence bolsters their findings. Controversy surrounding a Hemings-Jefferson relationship dates to his election in 1800. The light-skinned slave moved to Monticello in 1789, seven years after the death of Jefferson's wife, Martha, who was also Hemings' half-sister.

While she lived on the Virginia estate, Hemings had at least five children, some of whom were said to bear a striking resemblance to Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence.

The DNA results do not scientifically rule out the possibility that Eston's father was another Jefferson male, such as his younger brother Randolph, who did not live at Monticello but visited on occasion. The scientists said it is also theoretically possible that the Y chromosome marker shows up in Eston Hemings' descendants because of a liaison in a later generation.

Westerinen's wife, Andrea, and 17-year-old stepdaughter, Samantha James, say he has similarities to Jefferson.

"It's the eyebrows," says James, an avid Jeffersonian student. "And the nose."

More striking is the resemblance in interests, says Andrea Westerinen: Jeff Westerinen plays the fiddle, mandolin, guitar, bass and banjo, and his fields of study range from astronomy to botany. "He wants to be an expert in everything," she says.

Westerinen still wonders if such similarities are coincidental, but "you never know," he says.

Material from The Washington Post is included in this report.

Janet Burkitt's phone message number is 206-515-5689. Her e-mail address is: jburkitt@seattletimes.com