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The Nature report and the Foundation findings gave the family a sense of vindication against historians such as Joseph Ellis and Dumas Malone who have tried to protect Jefferson's reputation.

Ellis, author of American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, argued that Madison and Eston Hemings were born after Callender made the first public accusations against Jefferson. The book won the 1997 National Book Award.

Wrote Ellis: "It is difficult to believe that Jefferson would have persisted in producing progeny with Sally once the secret had been exposed and the Federalist press was poised to report it."

Ellis also argued that Jefferson lacked the "capabilities for the direct and physical expression of his sexual energies." His most sensual statements, Ellis wrote, "were aimed at beautiful buildings rather than beautiful women."

While Malone's six-volume biography, Jefferson and His Time, ardently defended Jefferson, many, including Ellis, contend it was Malone's research that revealed Jefferson was present at Monticello nine months prior to the birth of each of Sally's children, including two who died in infancy.

For the Westerinen family and their cousins, it was authors like Fawn M. Brodie, who kept their own family story alive. The late Brodie, in her 1974 best-seller Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, argues that the Jefferson/Hemings affair is a provable truth. Her book pushed the 1802 accusations into a new public debate.

"If the story of the Sally Hemings liaison be true, as I believe it is, it represents not scandalous debauchery with an innocent slave victim, as the Federalists and later the abolitionists insisted, but rather a serious passion that brought Jefferson and the slave woman much private happiness over a period lasting thirty-eight years," Brodie wrote.

Brodie notes Jefferson's preoccupation with Hemings can be seen in "one of the most subtly illuminating of all his writings, the daily journal he kept on a seven-week trip through eastern France, Germany, and Holland in March and April of 1788." In the 25-page diary of his travels, Jefferson describes the countryside using the word "mulatto" eight times.

Like their program, Westerinen said the recent CBS miniseries on the Jefferson/Hemings liaison opened a discussion. "I thought it was a beautiful piece of fiction based on historical research," she said. "It took the bare facts and imagined what is possible or probable. It was not unheard of for a slave to be in love with her master. Thomas Jefferson was charismatic, but remember, he owned her and could have sold her if she parted her hair the wrong way."

Though Westerinen thinks the mini-series was useful in fueling the discussion, black descendants of Hemings had trouble getting passed the way the relationship was portrayed as a love story. While the 800 descendants gathered for a screening at Ohio State University applauded at the end, it was hard to move beyond the slave-master relationship.

"Some of our cousins didn't like the fact that it said what it said about their relationship," said Marshall Jefferson Westerinen, 36. "They can't believe it was love."

While Banks-Young admits she can't accept the relationship as a love story, She said seeing Hemings was a start toward acceptance of her story.

"Sally now has a voice and we can see her face," she said. "We've not had that all these years. It's important to begin mending bridges that broke down after generations and generations of slavery and segregation."

Together Julia Jefferson Westerinen and Banks-Young will continue to mend those bridges by sharing their lives, their story and most importantly, Sally's story.

"I am very proud of her," Westerinen said. "She raised five wonderful kids and not being the mistress of her own home could not have been easy. All of her children became upstanding community citizens. Sally Hemings kept the interest of one of the greatest men who ever lived for 38 years. I am so proud of her."