America at 250: Who Decides Who Belongs in the Founding Story?

In September 2026, three people gathered in the Jefferson family cemetery at Monticello. They opened the earth and placed Cedric Jessup Jr.'s ashes inside, along with family mementos and a photograph of him as a baby in his mother's arms.

Cedric, known to his family as Dickie, had died in 2020 from complications of Covid-19. He had severe intellectual disabilities and was largely nonverbal. His sister, Gayle Jessup White, remembered that he liked to dress well, watch television, and look at magazines. Six years after his death, she arranged for his burial in the family graveyard of Thomas Jefferson, from whom they both descended.

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According to The New York Times, Cedric was the first Black descendant buried there. Robert Eppes, whose family traces its Jefferson ancestry through Jefferson's daughter Maria, came to dig Cedric's grave himself. It was a quiet act between family members, but it raised a question that reaches beyond the cemetery: Who gets recognized as part of a founding family?

The Families Who Kept the Record

White first heard about her Jefferson ancestry when she was 13. She spent decades tracing a family history that connected her to Jefferson through his great-great-grandson Moncure Robinson Taylor and Rachael Robinson, a Black woman whom the family had enslaved. White also learned that she descended from Peter Hemings, Sally Hemings's brother.

Her research drew on family accounts, census records, and letters. That combination matters. Enslaved people often appeared in written records as property, while their descendants preserved names and relationships that those records failed to explain. At Monticello, the Getting Word project has collected family histories from descendants of people Jefferson enslaved. The families were keeping records of their own, even when the institutions that shaped public history did not give those accounts equal weight.

Cedric's line of descent was not through Sally Hemings. His burial took place, however, as new research brought renewed attention to Hemings's descendants and their place in the Jefferson family. The two stories meet at Monticello, but they should not be confused.

What the Evidence Can Change

In 1998, a DNA study added evidence connecting the Jefferson and Hemings families. Monticello later concluded, after considering the genetic evidence alongside documents and family histories, that Jefferson's paternity of Sally Hemings's children was a settled historical matter.

Researchers have now reported recovering DNA from hair attributed to Jefferson and comparing it with DNA from living descendants. They say their findings provide powerful new evidence of his ancestry among Hemings descendants. The research may change the minds of people who have continued to dispute that connection. It did not give those families their ancestry. Generations had already carried and recorded accounts of where they came from.

Evidence also does not make an institutional decision on its own. The Monticello Association, a private organization that owns and maintains the family graveyard, has limited membership and burial to descendants of Jefferson's two daughters with his wife, Martha. White and her son became its first Black members in 2025. Cedric's burial followed in 2026. Whether the association will include descendants of Jefferson and Sally Hemings remains an open question.

That is why the cemetery matters. It makes recognition tangible. A family history can be documented, studied, and even accepted by the institution that operates Monticello, while another institution continues to draw its own boundary around who belongs.

A Place in the Story

Jefferson wrote that "all men are created equal" while enslaving people at Monticello. At America's 250th anniversary, there is no need to set aside either fact. Both belong in the story of the country he helped found, as do the lives of the people who sustained that place and the families who preserved their histories after they left it.

Eppes described Cedric's burial as part of his own need for "generational healing." That is his account of what the day meant to him. For White, the question extends to other descendants still seeking recognition. "The descendants of Hemings are also Jefferson descendants," she told The Times. "There is no place on the mountaintop or anyplace in America where Black people should be barred."

Cedric's burial did not resolve every question about the Jefferson family graveyard. It gave one man a resting place among his ancestors. In doing so, it showed what recognition can look like when a family makes room for someone who was always part of it.