Reference no: EM133942473

Question

After reading Chapter 13 Y-Chromosome DNA testing, you learned that paternal lineages possess the same Y-STR haplotype (barring mutation). Therefore, fathers, sons, brothers, uncles, and paternal cousins of the same family have the same haplotype and cannot be distinguished from one another unless a mutation has occurred.

Y-STR testing was used to settle the longstanding rumor of whether or not the third president of the United States, President Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, his slave. The testing consisted of Y-STR testing of direct male descendants from both the Jefferson and Hemings' male lines. This testing demonstrated that Eston Hemings had the same Y haplotype as the Jefferson family haplotype. Despite this testing, some people still contend that another Jefferson male descendant, specially Field Jefferson (the uncle to Thomas Jefferson) could have fathered Sally Hemings' children. At Jefferson's direction, he was buried on the Monticello grounds, in an area now designated as the Monticello Cemetery. The cemetery is owned by the Monticello Association, a society of his descendants through Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson. The Monticello Association will allow white descendants of Thomas Jefferson to be buried in the Jefferson Family graveyard at Monticello, but not the black Jefferson descendants.

Do you think additional DNA testing should be conducted to make a definitive conclusion that Thomas Jefferson and not Field Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings' children?

Thomas Jefferson is buried at Monticello and Eston Hemings is buried in the Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison, Wisconsin. Should an exhumation and DNA samples collection be conducted from both to make a definitive conclusion if Thomas Jefferson is the father of Eston Hemings?