Born in 1773 into slavery in Virginia, Sally Hemings was the daughter of John Wayles and his enslaved house servant, Elizabeth Hemings, and the half-sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson. Three of her grandparents were of European descent, and her maternal grandmother was African. She came to Monticello as inherited property with her mother and siblings, then worked from 1787 to 1789 in Paris, France, as a domestic servant in Jefferson's household, where she was free under French law. At age 16 in Paris, she negotiated a "treaty" with Jefferson under which she would receive "extraordinary privileges," including caring for Jefferson's chamber, raising her children, doing such light work as sewing, and never working in the fields at Monticello, while her future children would be freed at age 21 and she would return to Virginia and slavery. Between 1790 and 1808, she was the mother of at least six children fathered by Jefferson and lost at least two children in infancy. She had limited, if any, contact with her two eldest children after they left slavery and passed into white society, and she lived to see her two younger sons gain legal freedom in Jefferson's will. After Jefferson's death in 1826, she lived unofficially free in Charlottesville until her death in 1835.