Bettye Kearse stepped inside the mansion at Montpelier, former president James Madison's Virginia estate, to find the walls stripped bare. Rooms once opulently adorned have been deconstructed by archaeologists to reveal the slatted wooden frame that held together the home of one of the nation's premier architects.

Kearse, 64, a Massachusetts pediatrician, says she hopes to prove something the mansion's walls have so far kept hidden: that she, an African American, is a direct descendant of the man known as the father of the Constitution.

Kearse was one of dozens in attendance this weekend at the Montpelier Slave Descendants Reunion, where African Americans thought to have ties to the Orange County estate gathered to swap stories, learn about the home and submit DNA samples to help trace their roots. The estate is about a year away from completion of a $24 million restoration.

Madison had no children with his wife, Dolley, but Kearse says she has long believed her family's oral tradition, which holds that Madison fathered a child named Jim with a slave cook named Coreen, Kearse's great-great-great-great-grandmother. To prove it, Kearse has been working with Bruce Jackson, co-director of the Roots Project, which helps African Americans trace their genetic histories.

The plan is to compare the Y chromosomes -- which are identical across generations -- of male descendants in Madison's family to the Y chromosomes of some of Kearse's male cousins. Jackson and Kearse have been searching for Madison relatives in England but recently located a descendant of one of Madison's brothers in North Carolina.