Jan Ellen Lewis, Expert on Jefferson’s Other Family, Dies at 69

Jan Ellen Lewis, a historian whose fascination with Thomas Jefferson and his family led her to organize a groundbreaking conference to reassess his legacy after DNA testing showed that he had fathered children with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves, died on Aug. 28 in Manhattan. She was 69.

Barry Bienstock, her husband, said her death, at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, was caused by complications of a bone-marrow transplant. She had received a diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndromes, in which bone marrow does not produce enough healthy blood cells.

Professor Lewis, of Rutgers University, joined with Peter S. Onuf, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia, in organizing the Hemings-Jefferson conference, which was held in March 1999 near Monticello, Jefferson’s plantation in Charlottesville, Va.

A few months earlier, the scientific journal Nature had published the findings of DNA analysis of living Jefferson descendants showing with great certainty that he was the father of at least one of Hemings’s children.

It is believed likely, though, that Jefferson had been the father of at least six children with Hemings, four of whom survived to adulthood. That Hemings was a half sister of Jefferson’s wife, Martha, who died at 33 in 1782, added another wrinkle to the complex life of the nation’s third president. ...