09/22/2026
What can a few strands of hair reveal about history? Quite a lot. Pioneering genomics techniques developed by UC Santa Cruz researchers helped uncover new evidence in the long-standing question of whether Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings.
The work involved Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Ed Green and Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Beth Shapiro, both affiliates of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. Their research has advanced genomics methods for extracting and sequencing DNA from challenging sources, particularly rootless hair.
“We went from a long-shot fishing expedition to a slam dunk,” Green told The Atlantic. “From then on, it was pretty straightforward. We spend a lot of time getting DNA out of difficult things like hair.”
The story behind the science is featured in Smithsonian scholar Richard Kurin's new book, History by a Hair, out today, Sept. 22.
Researchers believe they have found genetic proof that one of the nation’s Founders fathered children with Sally Hemings—a woman he enslaved, Andrew Lawler reports: https://theatln.tc/9rFi4qd1
In a new book, the Smithsonian cultural anthropologist Richard Kurin describes the 15-year covert effort he led that resulted in what he and a team of geneticists, genealogists, historians, and anthropologists believe proves that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least two of Hemings’s six children, Lawler writes.
Their scientific study about the findings, currently under review for publication in “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” relied on the latest genetic techniques to reassemble Jefferson’s genome from the Founder’s hair, which his personal secretary snipped from his head hours after his death, at his Monticello home in 1826. Researchers matched that sequence with DNA from descendants of two of Hemings’s sons, Madison and Eston.
The ambitious effort was kept secret from the public. “We didn’t want people to assume results until we were really, really sure,” Kurin told Lawler.
For many Americans, the matter was already settled—but a vocal minority has continued to doubt that Jefferson and Hemings had a sexual relationship. The Heritage Foundation, for example, has criticized Monticello’s depiction of Jefferson in part for failing to tell visitors “that historians disagree about Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings.”
But Kurin is confident that the team’s careful work over a decade and a half will convince doubters of the accuracy of their findings, Lawler writes. “For me, it had nothing to do with an ideological or political agenda,” Kurin writes in his new book. “I was using evidence, logic, and the available tools and methods to follow a trail.”
Kurin also takes Jefferson at his word. “There is not a truth existing which I fear,” the Founder wrote two months before his death, “or would wish unknown to the whole world.”
Read more at the link.
🎨: The Atlantic. Sources: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Getty.
