Researchers Say They’ve Found the Truth About Thomas Jefferson

A secret 15-year effort has produced genetic evidence that one of the nation’s Founders fathered children with a woman he enslaved.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Getty. September 18, 2026, 5:05 PM ET Share Save T hree hours after Thomas Jefferson died at his Monticello home on July 4, 1826, his personal secretary, Nicholas Trist, snipped a lock of the Founder’s gray hair, still faintly reddish blond. Trist then tied the hair with orange thread and placed it in a paper packet, along with a short note describing what he’d done.