Her father believed that he was the oldest son of Sally Hemings and President Thomas Jefferson; this tradition became part of the family's oral history.Woodson, Byron W., A President in the Family, Praeger, 2001, p. 86. Over two hundred years after newspaper reports appeared in Virginia newspapers indicating the existence of Sally Hemings' son named Tom, allegedly the son of Thomas Jefferson, professional historians such as Annette Gordon-Reed have ignored the existence of some of the newspaper reports and critically important content of the ones that they have acknowledged. Gordon-Reed and others are "hiding the balls", a practice that Gordon-Reed criticized other historians for doing in her book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. According to professional historians, this was not supported by known historical evidence. In 1998 DNA testing of descendants of the Jefferson, Hemings and Woodson male lines showed conclusively that there was no match between the Jefferson and Woodson lines; the Woodson male line did show western European paternal ancestry. According to historians at Monticello, no documents support the claim that Woodson was Hemings' first child, as he appeared to have been born before any known child of hers. Professional historians have ignored the erasure of the name of a male slave, who was born in 1790, whose named was recorded in Jefferson's Farm Book by Thomas Jefferson and the survival of at least one letter of the name of the mother of the son in the Farm Book, as well. Thomas Woodson was born in 1790 and this time also matches the year of birth for the son named Tom attributed to Sally Hemings by newsman James Callender."Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: A Brief Account", Plantation & Slvery, Monticello, Quote: "The DNA study found no link between the descendants of Field Jefferson [tested because Thomas Jefferson had no direct male descendants] and Thomas C. Woodson... But there is no indication in Jefferson's records of a child born to Hemings before 1795, and there are no known documents to support that Thomas Woodson was Hemings' first child.", accessed 6 March 2011. Woodson, A President in the Family, 215–17.
