Officials say Washington did not father slave

Sisters say they'll continue their effort to prove ancestry

Bob Jackson, News Staff Writer

Published July 5, 2001 at midnight

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Monday, March 27, 2000

No evidence supports the claim by two black sisters who say they have an ancestral link to George Washington, say officials at the Mount Vernon Estate and Garden in Virgina.

Dennis Pogue, associate director for preservation at Historic Mount Vernon, said Washington was not in Mount Vernon in 1784, when he allegedly fathered a son with Venus, a young slave who lived on the estate of his brother, John Augustine Washington.

Linda Bryant of Aurora and her sister Janet Allen of Peoria, Ill., believe their great-great-great-great-grandfather, West Ford, was Washington's illegitimate son.

Bryant said that no matter what Mount Vernon officials say, they will continue their efforts to prove that the father of our country was also the father of a slave.

"And we will put all the information on our Web site,'' she said (www.westfordlegacy.com).

"In terms of the evidence that's available, there still really isn't evidence other than the Ford family's tradition to link George Washington to Venus and West Ford, but there is some evidence to suggest the possibility that another Washington family member fathered Ford,'' Pogue said.

The sisters and a distant cousin, Judith S. Burton, attended a three-hour meeting with Mount Vernon officials in Virginia March 17.

Also attending the meeting were a DNA specialist, an outside scholar, a medical doctor and a historian.

"We went over the evidences and talked about all the different materials,'' Pogue said.

Scholars have suggested that George Washington was the father because of evidence connecting West Ford and John Augustine Washington's family.

"We still feel strongly that there is no evidence to suggest that George Washington ever knew Venus or West Ford, but there is certainly some suggestion that West Ford was treated in a very special way by the John Augustine family,'' Pogue said.

Most of the sisters' facts come from a 1986 Vanderbilt University doctoral thesis titled A History of Gum Springs, Virginia: A Report of a Case Study of Leadership in a Black Enclave by Judith Burton.

Burton points out in her thesis that Ford was the only slave freed in a will left by Washington's sister-in-law, Hannah Washington. There reportedly also was a physical likeness between Ford and George Washington, and the Washingtons treated Ford as a family member.

Ford owned his home, attended church with the Washingtons, went hunting with them and traveled with them, Burton said.

To relate their family tradition to known historical facts, Bryant said that George Washington visited his brother in April 1784 for the funeral of John Augustine's 17-year-old son, also named Augustine, who was killed by a classmate in a gun accident.

"We believe that is when he had the relationship with Venus,'' said Bryant, a health writer and pharmaceutical representative. "Venus was made available to him for his comfort.''

Pogue said Mount Vernon is very interested in obtaining from the sisters more of their evidence and is very interested in learning about the descendants of Mount Vernon slaves.

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