At some point early in her life before 1746, Betty became the property of Francis Eppes IV, owner of the Bermuda Hundred plantation in the colony of Virginia. The records are less clear as to Betty's birthplace, but many sources suggest it was Williamsburg, Virginia. 'Hemings,' records state, is the last name of her father, the English captain. Betty was born in 1735 to the white 'captain of an English trading vessel' and a 'full-blooded African woman' believed to be named Parthenia. Gordon-Reed unearths records of the Hemings family going back to Sally's mother, Elizabeth 'Betty' Hemings. However, unlike most scholarship on the slaves of Monticello, Gordon-Reed's book is about much more than just Sally.

Born Sarah Hemings around 1773, there is a near-complete historical consensus that Sally and Thomas Jefferson were engaged in a long-term relationship-inasmuch as an extended period of regular sexual congress between a master and his slave could be termed a 'relationship'-and that Jefferson was the father of her five children. The most famous member of the Hemings family is undoubtedly Sally Hemings. The year after its publication, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for History, making Gordon-Reed the first African-American to win this award. American author and historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s non-fiction book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008) tells the history of four generations of the Hemings slave family who were eventually owned by President Thomas Jefferson until his death in 1826.

Annette gordon reed sally hemings