Thomas Jefferson and Me
For 2024, I’m writing a series of blog posts I’m calling “Daughter of Presidents,” exploring my family tree connections to the Presidents of the United States. These posts will appear each Monday
This is the second presidential connection that relies on my Workman family line. On January 1, I wrote about my connection to President George Washington, which relies in part on the marriage of Mary Workman to John Doyle Lee, a Mormon (and polygamist), in the 1840s. That connection actually fell apart over the confusing intermarriages among the leading families in colonial Virginia.
At first, I thought that this relationship had fallen prey to the same problem. But it turned out to be a more interesting story than I anticipated, as you’ll see below.
NOTE: Last week, one of my readers told me that it is a little silly to focus on relationships like “1st cousin 1x removed of husband my 2nd cousin 5x removed.” Of course it’s silly. That’s kind of the point – my friends know that I have a finely-honed sense of silly, so I get a kick out of this. It’s a self-own, a parody of an obsessed genealogist. But more importantly, this type of research opens doors to historical stories I either knew nothing about or knew a little about but didn’t know that I had any connection to them at all. That’s the case with this connection, as you’ll see below. I do genealogy research to uncover the stories, not to revel in a pedigree.
I didn’t have any problem verifying this chart through Jacob Workman (#7), who was my 5th great-grandfather. I included his brother Joseph (#8) on my tree years ago, as I was first developing this tree. However, I had not done any deep analysis of Joseph’s family, and certainly not of the extended families of his wife and children.
In my January 1 essay on George Washington, I mentioned the difficulty of following the Workman family because of their large families. There were a lot of people with the Workman surname, and the abundance of sons meant that each succeeding generation had even more people named Workman. The Workman family has been heavily researched; in 1962, Thelma Anderson published a massive Workman Family History that thoroughly documents what she was able to discover through painstaking one-the-ground research.
In addition, there are several Facebook groups focused on the Workman family; the largest, called The Real Workman Family, has over 1,000 members. One of the Facebook pages is called Workman Family of West Virginia, which is important for this analysis. I have researched my branch of the Workman family pretty thoroughly; they originated in New York City in the 1640s and then moved west over the next two centuries – from New York to New Jersey to Maryland to Pennsylvania to Kentucky to Tennessee to Illinois to Oklahoma to Arizona and then back to Virginia.
However, the Workman family line that includes Joseph followed this same pattern through Maryland but then diverged to Pennsylvania and to Virginia (Boone County, which became part of West Virginia in 1863). Joseph is noted as one of the founders of Logan County at the end of the 18th century. In their wanderings from Maryland to southwest Virginia, their interactions with leading families in Virginia contributed to general confusion.
As a side note – This branch of the Workman family is closely associated with both the Hatfield and McCoy lines of the famous feud. The connection between these two families rests on Moses Workman, the son of Joseph Workman. Here’s what I found when I looked more closely at this connection:
Hatfield Island lies in the Guyandotte River in the city of Logan. Named for Elias Hatfield in the early 1900s, it is often called Midelburg Island for Ferdinand Midelburg, a later owner. The 43-acre island, 2,000 feet long and 1,000 feet wide, was the site of the original settlement of Logan County by James and Joseph Workman in the 1790s.
The potential connection between the Workman family and President Thomas Jefferson was new to me, so I began to test the relationships to see if they hold up under scrutiny. I began to trace the next few connections. I was able to verify several facts:
Joseph Workman (#8) had a daughter named Anne Workman (#9).
Anne Workman had a daughter Mary Workman, who married a man named Muncy (#10).
Mary Workman Muncy married a man named Henry Davis (#11).
Henry Davis’s father was named Thomas Davis (#12)
But then I found a problem. Official records that I was able to find failed to document that the mother of Thomas Davis was Jemima Davis (#13). Was this connection going to fall apart under closer scrutiny?
According to the chart at the beginning of this essay, Jemima was the sister of Peter Jefferson (#14), the father of President Thomas Jefferson. I should have been able to find both Jemima and Peter on the list of children of President Jefferson’s grandfather, also named Thomas Jefferson. But her name was not there.
What to do, what to do?
I did a little random Googling and quickly came up with a possible reason for the absence of Jemima from the Jefferson family records; although there’s some evidence that she was the daughter of Thomas Jefferson II (President Jefferson’s grandfather) and his first wife, a woman named Alice Ward, the problem is that Jemima was born several years after the death of the second (and last) wife of Thomas Jefferson II. If she is the daughter of TJII, she must have been born out of wedlock.
Both WikiTree and Geni.com have good profiles of the people in this family line. You can check them out here and here if you want to know more about what’s going on.
I was able to find a fair amount of information confirming that Thomas Jefferson II had a daughter named Jemima. Contemporary sources show that three of the sons of Jemima and her husband John Davis – Robert, Thomas, and William – claimed to be first cousins of President Thomas Jefferson. A genealogist who has done more work on this line than me has run a detailed analysis of these claims, which you can read here. This is interesting but not definitive.
A dialog in the Ancestry message board suggests a tantalizing possibility – that Jemima Jefferson was a mulatto child borne by one of the women enslaved by a member of the Jefferson family – either Thomas Jefferson II or one of his sons. After eliminating other possibilities, this researcher concluded that Jemima’s mother had to be one of the enslaved individuals held by the Jefferson family. You can read this detailed analysis here.
The connection between the Jefferson family and enslaved people has been pretty well documented and confirmed by DNA analysis. The Monticello Association has accepted that President Jefferson fathered several children with an enslaved woman – Sally Hemings – whose father was John Wayles (who was also the father of TJ’s wife Martha Wayles). In 18th century Virginia it was clearly not uncommon for slaveholding men to father children by their enslaved women. This does not prove that Jemima’s mother was an enslaved woman held by Thomas Jefferson II, but it adds credibility to the claim.
Conclusion: I think I have to identify this connection as more likely than not but unproven. There are a lot of tantalizing possibilities, but, as I said, genealogists who have been looking at this far longer than me can’t provide a definite answer.