Monticello Blog

With the coming of Thanksgiving comes also a burble of chatty news stories about the origins thereof, and usually something about turkeys. Not far behind comes some sort of mention of the Founding Fathers, and how they all felt about turkeys. I've seen several of these articles in the last few days and I don't know what else to think but that somebody out there has been working overtime, making up stories about Founding Fathers and turkeys.

Last September, I received a question from someone looking for a Jefferson letter titled, "The Value of Constitutions." Jefferson didn't usually bother to give his letters titles, so this was a bit puzzling. I finally figured out that this letter had been published in a volume edited by Edward Dumbauld, chapter 4 of which was titled, "The Value of Constitutions." It seemed pretty obvious that somewhere along the way, someone had quoted from the letter and attached the chapter title in such a way that people assumed that it was the title of the letter. Whoopsies.

I'm eagerly delving into a book that arrived just today: Antonio Molina, Patriarch of the Anthony Mullins Family: An American History, compiled by Marjorie O'Brien Casteel. Who is Antonio Molina, AKA Anthony Mullins (or "little Anthony," as Jefferson called him)?

It is claimed, by websites and other sources various and sundry, that Thomas Jefferson, upon hearing of a meteorite crash in Connecticut in 1807 and its subsequent reportage by two professors at Yale, scoffed that it "was easier to believe that two Yankee professors could lie than to admit that stones could fall from heaven."

A patron asked us about a very unusual quotation the other day: apparently someone, sometime said that Thomas Jefferson was "...a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father..."; this was supposedly a comment made by Jefferson's political opponents in the election of 1800.

Picking up a recent Economist magazine, an article discusses how desalination of the oceans for usable water is becoming less expensive these days. What does this have to do with Jefferson?

One of our informants encountered a story, related by one Thomas Bloomer Balch, a Presbyterian minister recalling that in his childhood in the D.C. area during Mr. Jefferson's presidency, a little boy wandered onto the grounds of the President's House and was killed by TJ's "ill-tempered goat."

Apparently scientists have found that Thomas Jefferson's DNA belongs to a Y-chromosome haplogroup (K2) commonly found in the Middle East and North Africa.

Sometimes we get inexplicable rashes of questions.