Researcher linked Thomas Jefferson, slave Sally Hemings

Eugene Foster, the retired pathologist who orchestrated the DNA testing that showed Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one of the children of slave Sally Hemings, died Monday at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, according to his son-in-law Brian Pusser. He was 81.

Historians had speculated for nearly two centuries that Jefferson’s affair with the household slave had produced offspring, because of rumors at the time and because the children strongly resembled the nation’s third president.

Some of the children also said they were Jefferson’s descendants. But most experts had dismissed the speculation as idle gossip.

Foster was brought into the controversy by a friend, amateur historian Winifred Bennett. At a 1996 dinner with Foster, she speculated about the possibility of using DNA to trace the possible linkage.

“I reached the conclusion that theoretically it may be almost impossible using the conventional technology that was being used for tracing ancestry,” he said later.

When Bennett announced to the media that they would try to trace the ancestry, “all the experts said it was a crazy idea, and I was somewhat embarrassed,” he said.

One of those experts, however, told Foster about a then-new technique that used only the Y, or male, chromosome to trace ancestry. Unlike other chromosomes, the Y does not undergo recombination during reproduction and is thus passed from father to son intact.

Foster contacted geneticist Christopher Tyler-Smith of the University of Oxford in England, who agreed to perform the tests.

Foster and Bennett tracked down four male lineages to test: Jefferson’s lineage, descended from his paternal grandfather because Jefferson himself had no direct male heirs; the lineages of Thomas Woodson and Eston Hemings Jefferson, Sally Hemings’ oldest and youngest sons; and that of the Carrs, two of Jefferson’s sister’s sons, who were widely thought to have fathered Hemings’ children.

Hemings’ other children left no surviving male heirs.

Their conclusion: The Y chromosome of a descendant of Eston Hemings Jefferson matched that of Jefferson’s lineage, that of Woodson’s descendants did not, and none of them matched the Carrs’.

The results led to a split between Bennett and Foster. Bennett wanted to hold the results for a book she was planning to write.

Foster wanted to publish them in a scientific article.

“It became clear to me once all the scientists were involved in this that the study, whatever the results might be, would only have real credibility if published . . . in a reputable journal,” he said.

The findings were published in 1998 in the journal Nature. Bennett never wrote her book.

In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Assn., which operates Monticello, concluded that “although paternity cannot be established with absolute certainty, our evaluation of the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings.”

But the conclusion remains somewhat controversial. Members of the Monticello Assn., who claim descent from Jefferson through his eldest daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, have voted not to admit Hemings’ descendants. Some of those descendants see racism as a factor.

Eugene Abram Foster was born in the Bronx on April 26, 1927, and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1943. He attended college and medical school at Washington University in St. Louis, where he met his future wife, Jane Brown.

He had just started his internship in Salt Lake City when he was drafted. He urged Jane to return from France, where she was working, and they were married. He spent his three years of military service on Indian reservations in North and South Dakota.

Foster spent 17 years in the pathology department at the University of Virginia and 14 more at Tufts New England Medical Center in Boston before retiring in Charlottesville.

Throughout his career, Foster spent considerable time reading and recording books for the blind and dyslexic.

Foster’s survivors include Jane, his wife of 56 years; two daughters, Susannah Baxendale of Culver City and Rebecca Pusser of Charlottesville; a son, Ethan of Sedona, Ariz.; and four grandchildren.

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thomas.maugh@latimes.com