On January 25, the Washington Post ran an article by the author of a new book related to Thomas Jefferson with the headline “How Did We Lose a President’s Daughter?”

In the first sentence, the author writes: “Many people know that Thomas Jefferson had a long-standing relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings. But fewer know that they had four children, three boys and a girl, who survived to adulthood.”

None of this can be verified. No one knows whether Thomas Jefferson fathered even one child by Sally Hemings.

The confusion originated in part with 1998 DNA tests intended to settle the questions surrounding Jefferson and Hemings. Their findings were announced in the British journal Nature in an article with an erroneous headline that read: “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child.”

The author of that article, pathologist Eugene Foster, apologized in an issue of Nature two months later, writing: “The title assigned to our study was misleading in that it represented only the simplest explanation of our molecular findings: namely, that Thomas Jefferson, rather than one of the Carr brothers, was likely to have been the father of Eston Hemings Jefferson.”