Posted on 09/23/2026 12:48:56 AM PDT by woodpusher
BioRxiv
The Preprint Server for Biology
The DNA Legacy of Thomas Jefferson
Posted September 21, 2026
Richard E. Green, Samuel H. Vohr, Joshua D Kapp, Jane E. Ailes, Samuel Sacco, Remy Nguyen, James Cahill, Peter D. Heintzman, Joanne Flores, Logan Kistler, Courtney A. Hofman, Robert C. Fleischer, Beth Shapiro, Richard Kurin
doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.09.18.752809
This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?].
Abstract
Allegations that Thomas Jefferson fathered the children of the enslaved Sally Hemings emerged in the context of U.S. presidential politics in the late 1700s and early 1800s and entailed strongly contested denials and affirmations by family members, biographers, and historians ever since. Previous analysis of Y chromosome markers in contemporary members of the Jefferson and Hemings patrilines was consistent with the paternity hypothesis but rejected by those who pointed out that, absent Jefferson DNA and its direct comparison to the DNA of possible descendants, other Jefferson males could have fathered Sally Hemings children. In this study, we developed an innovative technique to recover DNA from multiple rootless hair samples in a museum collection whose provenance, mitochondrial genomes, Y chromosome markers, and identity to each other indicate that these hairs and the DNA from them are from Thomas Jefferson. Using these DNA data, we find clear evidence of Thomas Jefferson ancestry in descendants of both his wife Martha Wayles Jefferson and Sally Hemings. We measured the amount of identical-by-descent DNA shared between Thomas Jefferson and his known and putative descendants. We find that the amount of shared Jefferson DNA is more likely under the model of direct Thomas Jefferson paternity than other proposed scenarios.
Competing Interest Statement
REG is co-founder and paid consultant of Astrea Forensics. SHV is employed by Embark Veterinary, Inc. BS is the chief science officer of Colossal Biosciences.
Funder Information Declared
The Smithsonian provided its own trust funds to support the research.
Copyright
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.18.752809v1.full.pdf
Full report, 18 pp.
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This isn't true either. The Democratic-Republican party did not become the Democrat party. Andrew Jackson founded the Democrat party. The two parties are not closely related.
I know modern Democrats want to claim Jefferson, but their claims are unfounded. His philosophy and theirs are quite different.
"Jefferson the Jacobin will bring guillotines to America!":
exnavy: "TJ was the founder of what became the republican party."
No, just the opposite.
What's true is that Jefferson referred to himself as a small-r "republican".
But Jefferson was also a huge fan of revolution and the "democratic" French Revolution (1789 to 1799) especially.
The threat of revolution was so real, Jefferson's Federalist opponents in 1800 claimed: "Jefferson the Jacobin will bring guillotines to America!"
That's what "Democratic" and "Democracy" meant in 1800.
1807 Jefferson's Gallatin Plan for massive road, canals & other infrastructure spending:
So Jefferson was elected in 1801 (barely) and none of it proved true.
What was true is that Democratic Pres. Jefferson did everything in office he had accused the Federalists of doing, or wanting to do, plus a lot more, notably:
Bottom line: Jefferson -- while calling himself a small-r republican -- was the founder of the Democratic-Republicans, shortened to Democratics and "The Democracy".
His opposition Federalists eventually became Whigs, then after 1854, today's Republicans.
Jefferson in many ways was typical of Democrats to this day.
Yeah... Sure...
Fawn Brodie managed to find a newspaper interview with Madison Hemings, a son of Sally Hemings, who claimed that Thomas Jeffeson was his father--but said that Jefferson never treated him as his son. The 1870 census taker wrote in the margin next to Madison Hemings' name "This man is the son of Thomas Jefferson" so clearly that is what Madison told him.
Of course Madison himself did not know for sure--only knew what his mother told him.
I thought Broadway had proven that all of the Founding Fathers were Black and that Hamilton was the father of all slaves.
Jefferson’s gravestone inscription listed three accomplishments:
“Here was buried Thomas Jefferson”
“Author of the Declaration of American Independence”
“of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom”
“Father of the University of Virginia”
Curious that nothing about being President or Governor of Virginia.
A lot of black men have Washington as their surname. Maybe they should do DNA tests to see if they all have George Washington’s Y-DNA haplogroup.
Yeah, I know this is a new DNA analysis separated from previous ones some years ago.
As I had said earlier about this, everybody on both sides of the aisle is celebrating there has not been this much unity since 9/11.
Jefferson haters everywhere are hugging, rejoicing, and smiling with glee.
It’s a damning visual on just how deeply left wing history has become - in part because conservatives abandoned history and said to progressives “here, you can have this. We want you to have it!”.(but that is another story)
IF you took 100 historians you could not come up with 100 minutes for which you could collectively add together from them for which they have researched God in connection with the Founding. (Eric Metaxas found it all over the place, since he simply read original sources)
But just one historian on this Jefferson story, you can single handedly count up years and decades of time for which they have researched connections.
If no historians write the story of America’s Godly Heritage, well there are no books and that proves it did not exist. America is secular.
(Just making a cross connection here)
The historians are worse than The New York Times. I hate their guts. There’s like five good historians out there and one of them is an actual FReeper with PragerU who will talk with us. Meanwhile there’s like several million bogus leftist historians.
The conservative retreat from culture nearly a century ago has cost us profoundly.
In practical terms, it means nobody else with proven expertise in the field has yet challenged the assumptions in this article.
Preprint
In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal.Peer review
Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers)... a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field... to maintain quality standards, improve performance, and provide credibility. In academia, scholarly peer review is typically used to determine an academic paper's suitability for publication.
Brand new hair discovery.
Brand new DNA test.
His claim about Jefferson and Trump just sounded like sarcasm or a joke. Your rebuttal to the facts of who started the Democrat party was quite enough. No need to throw the “troll” opprobrium around to someone whose signup date is year 2000.
Americans were not politicized back then.
Authoring the Declaration, Founding a University, and Authoring that important statute are clearly more important than being a governor or being president.
Culture is downstream of politics.
Nowadays everybody is just politics politics politics, elections elections elections. When is the next election?
And women never lie about paternity, right? Especially to burnish their groupie creds. LOL
Back in those days, liberty and freedom were much more important than a few years of service in “small government.”
Sally Hemings was born about 1773 to the enslaved Elizabeth "Betty" Hemings and her mother's owner, John Wayles. Betty's parents were a "full-blooded African" enslaved woman and a white English sea captain surnamed Hemings. Captain Hemings tried to purchase his daughter Betty from their enslaver, Francis Eppes, but the planter refused out of curiosity about how the mixed ethnicities would turn out in Betty.[23] Upon Eppes' death his daughter, Martha Eppes, inherited Betty, and took her as a personal slave upon her marriage to Wayles.Of course Thomas Jefferson did the same thing. I believe that one of my relatives did the same thing too.
Ann Coutler’s take is interesting:
https://anncoulter.com/2019/07/03/was-thomas-jefferson-on-the-duke-lacrosse-team1/
The recent findings are based a a new scientific method which allowed the scientists to map the entire Thomas Jefferson DNA using; hair without follicles. A 2019 take is irrelevant to the take based on a newer scientific method.
The book by Richard Kurin, History by a Hair, 406 pp. was published yesterday. It provides a detailed review of what was done. I provided a linnk to the full 18 pp. paper submitted to biopRxiv. The newer science has made criticisms based on outdated science obsolete.
https://www.liherald.com/stories/gilgo-dna-evidence-allowed,217179
Hair DNA evidence deemed admissible in Gilgo Beach murder trial
Posted September 3, 2025
In September 2025, Suffolk County Supreme Court Judge Tim Mazzei ruled that Astrea Forensics’ whole genome sequencing method — which extracts SNP data from rootless hairs and creates DNA profiles — is “generally accepted as reliable within the scientific community”. This was the first time such technology was admitted in a New York state court, setting a potential precedent. The judge’s decision relied on expert testimony from University of Washington professor Kelley Harris and Astrea Labs founder Richard Green, and no defense expert contested the method’s reliability.
Sorry...We need the hair from his brother.
No. The newer scientific method renders your outdated point obsolete.
https://www.liherald.com/stories/gilgo-dna-evidence-allowed,217179
Hair DNA evidence deemed admissible in Gilgo Beach murder trial
Posted September 3, 2025
In September 2025, Suffolk County Supreme Court Judge Tim Mazzei ruled that Astrea Forensics’ whole genome sequencing method — which extracts SNP data from rootless hairs and creates DNA profiles — is “generally accepted as reliable within the scientific community”. This was the first time such technology was admitted in a New York state court, setting a potential precedent. The judge’s decision relied on expert testimony from University of Washington professor Kelley Harris and Astrea Labs founder Richard Green, and no defense expert contested the method’s reliability.
Science weighs heavily compared to bullshit.
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