Maria was only five years younger than Sally, and technically Sally was Marias aunt. He married a white woman in Maryland, and their only child, a daughter, was not known by the white folks to have any colored blood coursing in her veins. On the death of John Wales, my grandmother, his concubine, and her children by him fell to Martha, Thomas Jeffersons wife, and consequently became the property of Thomas Jefferson, who in the course of time became famous, and was appointed minister to France during our revolutionary troubles, or soon after independence was gained. I_Smell_Mendacious. The story of the enslaved woman who had a decades long affair with Thomas Jefferson. How Old Was Sally Hemings When She Was With Jefferson? He and I rented a house and took mother to live with us, till her death, which event occurred in 1835. Sally Hemings (1773-1835) is one of the most famousand least knownAfrican American women in U.S. history. Virginia Chronicle.com, Library of Virginia. After the completion of the South Wing, Hemings lived in one of the servants rooms there. Hemings would later give birth to her first child at 16 during Jeffersons (then 45) tenure in France. She had seven children by white men and seven by colored menfourteen in all. Sally lived with her sons in Charlottesville until her death in 1835. But the most logical explanation is that Thomas was the father. Home; Service. Oportunidades Iguales Para Las Mujeres En El Trabajo y La Educaccion, Womens Strike for Equality, New York, Fifth Avenue, 1970, Eugene Gordon photograph collection, 1970-1990. But Jefferson made a solemn pledge to her that if she returned, she would be granted extraordinary privileges and their children would be freed at age 21. Recent DNA testing has concluded however that Hemings children are connected to the Jefferson bloodline. After leaving Monticello, Hemings moved with her two youngest sons to nearby Charlottesville, Virginia, where she died in 1835. Decades later, Jeffersons close friend John Hartwell Cocke commented twice about Jefferson and Sally Hemings in his diary. After Sally and Thomas Jefferson returned from Paris in 1789, she gave birth to a son, Tom. He died shortly after he was born. She gave birth to six other children: Harriet Hemings I, who died when she was two, Beverly Hemings, Thenia Hemings, who died in infancy, Harriet Hemings II, Madison Hemings and Eston Hemings. The names of the living were Ann, Thomas Jefferson, Ellen, Cornelia, Virginia, Mary, James, Benj.