In the early hours of a September morning in 1789, a sixteen-year-old girl prepared to leave Paris. Her name was Sally Hemings. For nearly two years, she had lived in the city, part of Thomas Jefferson’s household. In France, slavery was illegal. She could have stayed. She could have claimed her freedom and begun a life beyond Jefferson’s reach. But she did not. Instead, she agreed to return to Virginia—a place where her body and her children would belong to Jefferson by law. She bargained for what she could: a promise that those children, born enslaved, would one day be free. In choosing to go back, Hemings surrendered the certainty of freedom for a fragile hope, binding her future to Jefferson’s word—and to the kin she left behind, still enslaved on Virginia soil.

Sally Hemings was enslaved. She was also the half-sister of Jefferson’s dead wife. The children they would have together came into a world that refused to recognize them fully—as kin, as citizens, as free. And yet they were a family. A family made in secrecy and shaped by power, but a family nonetheless. Her choice, quiet and unrecorded, reverberates still—through the lives it shaped and the nation it unsettled.

Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello tells this story with extraordinary care, revealing how the lives of one Black family were entangled with one of America’s most revered founders. Today, we explore what their story teaches us about race, kinship, and the meaning of family under slavery, and how family history can uncover truths that challenge the myths we inherit. Sign up for shownotes here: https://reunion-a-podcast-about-family-histories.ghost.io/

In a Virginia courtroom in the mid-1700s, a woman named Mary Aggy stood before a judge, not to defend herself with a lawyer, but with a lineage. She traced her ancestry back to a free woman, arguing that her own enslavement was unlawful. Her case rested not on testimony or character, but on genealogy. In early America, family history could mean the difference between bondage and freedom.

But Mary Aggy wasn’t alone. Across the colonies, people used family trees to claim land, assert status, and protect privilege. Genealogy wasn’t just a record of who begat whom; it was a form of power. It shaped who belonged, who ruled, and who was remembered. In her book Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America, historian Karin Wulf uncovers how family history was used to build nations, enforce hierarchies, and sometimes, challenge them. Today, we talk with her about how the past was organized through kinship, and why understanding those structures still matters in the present.