A recently divorced Charlottesville, Virginia, resident, Winifred Bennett, found a modest share of temporary celebrity without really meaning to in 1993, when at a dinner party she made an offhand suggestion that one of Virginia's great lingering mysteries might be solved by DNA testing.
One of her dinner companions, a retired pathologist, was Eugene Foster, a man capable of conducting such tests. Foster assembled a team and went at it.
The team's conclusion was that at least one of Monticello slave Sally Hemmings' children and possibly all of them, had been fathered by either Thomas Jefferson or another male in his immediate family.
The Foster team's study was published in the journal Nature in 1998. It was not met with a great deal of enthusiasm by the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, the Monticello Association and some others who claim to be descendants of the remarkable Mr. Jefferson.
Bennett, who had been a Ford Agency model in her younger days, had read about how DNA had failed to support the claims of another Charlottesville resident, Anna Manahan, who claimed for many years to be Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Russia's last czar.
Bennett died in 2006 at age 71.
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