Full Name: Thomas Jefferson; Profession: American Founding Father, statesman, lawyer, diplomat, philosopher, architect, author, agronomist, and 3rd President of the United States of America (1801–1809), who also served as the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776); Governor of Virginia (1779–1781); first United States Secretary of State (1790–1793) under President George Washington; and second Vice President of the United States (1797–1801) under President John Adams, and who additionally founded the University of Virginia (1819) and served as its first rector, designed the iconic Monticello estate and the Virginia State Capitol building, established the Library of Congress, negotiated the Louisiana Purchase doubling the size of the United States; commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition; championed the separation of church and state; authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom; and was a polymath fluent in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish. Nationality: American (born a British subject in the Colony of Virginia, later a citizen of the United States of America); Born: April 13, 1743 (New Style; Old Style date April 2, 1743, Julian calendar), on a Saturday, at his family's Shadwell plantation. Birthplace: Shadwell, Albemarle County, Colony of Virginia, British America (present-day Charlottesville area, Virginia, USA); Generation: American Founding Fathers Generation (the remarkable late-18th-century cohort of revolutionary leaders from colonial Virginia's planter class, active from the 1770s through the early 1820s, who established the United States of America and its democratic institutions); Chinese Zodiac: Water Pig (壬亥 — born in the Year of the Pig; the Chinese New Year of 1743 began on January 26, 1743, marking the start of the Water Pig year, which ran until February 12, 1744; persons born under the Pig sign are traditionally described as compassionate, generous, intelligent, diligent, hard-working, sincere, courageous, and strong-willed); Zodiac Sign: Aries (born April 13, fully within the Aries window of March 21 to April 19) 19. Aries is the first sign of the Western zodiac, ruled by Mars, a cardinal fire sign associated with leadership, boldness, initiative, and pioneering spirit. Age in 2026: Would have been 283 years old in 2026, having been born in 1743 (died at age 83 in 1826). Marital Status: Widowed — married Martha Wayles Skelton, a 23-year-old widow from Charles City County, Virginia, on January 1, 1772, at her family's plantation; theirs was an exceptionally loving and close partnership, and Jefferson described their ten years of marriage as "ten years of unchequered happiness"; Martha died on September 6, 1782, at the age of 34, following complications after the birth of their sixth child; Jefferson never remarried, and reportedly promised a dying Martha he would not do so, honoring that vow for the remaining 44 years of his life. Children: Thomas Jefferson fathered six children with his wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, during their ten-year marriage: Martha "Patsy" Jefferson (born September 27, 1772 — died October 10, 1836, survived to adulthood and married Thomas Mann Randolph Jr.), Jane Randolph Jefferson (born April 3, 1774 — died September 1775, died in infancy), an unnamed son (born May 28, 1777 — died June 14, 1777, lived only 17 days), Mary "Polly" Jefferson (born August 1, 1778 — died April 17, 1804, survived to adulthood and married John Wayles Eppes, but died young at age 25), Lucy Elizabeth Jefferson (born November 3, 1780 — died April 15, 1781, died in infancy), and a second Lucy Elizabeth Jefferson (born May 8, 1782 — died circa October 13, 1784, died of whooping cough); only two daughters, Martha and Mary, survived to adulthood; additionally, modern historical scholarship supported by DNA evidence strongly indicates that Jefferson fathered six children with the enslaved woman Sally Hemings (a half-sister to his deceased wife Martha), of whom four survived to adulthood: Beverly Hemings (born 1798), Harriet Hemings (born 1801), Madison Hemings (born 1805), and Eston Hemings (born 1808), all of whom Jefferson freed either during his lifetime or through his will; Description: Thomas Jefferson stands as one of the most towering, brilliant, and paradoxical figures in all of American and world history — a Renaissance man of breathtaking intellectual breadth and a transformative statesman whose ideas have shaped the modern democratic world for over two centuries; born April 13, 1743, at Shadwell plantation in the Colony of Virginia, the third child of planter and surveyor Peter Jefferson and Jane Randolph, he received a formidable classical education, attended the College of William and Mary, studied law under George Wythe, and was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1767; as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, the then 33-year-old Jefferson was selected to draft the Declaration of Independence in 1776, producing one of the most influential documents in human history, proclaiming that "all men are created equal" and endowed with unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, words that resonated across the globe and inspired democratic revolutions from France to Latin America; during the American Revolution he served as Governor of Virginia (1779–1781), navigating the state through British invasion, and afterward served as U.S. minister to France (1784–1789), witnessing the early stirrings of the French Revolution firsthand; as the first Secretary of State under George Washington, he clashed repeatedly with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton over the nature of the new republic, and these disagreements gave rise to the first American political parties — Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans versus Hamilton's Federalists elected the 3rd President in 1800 in what Jefferson himself called the "Revolution of 1800," he served two full terms (1801–1809) and presided over the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, acquiring some 828,000 square miles of territory from Napoleon's France and nearly doubling the size of the United States for approximately $15 million; he commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the western territories, dispatched the U.S. Navy against the Barbary pirates, signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves (1807), and maintained American neutrality during the Napoleonic Wars; in retirement at Monticello, Jefferson founded the University of Virginia in 1819, designing its Academical Village himself and championing it as his proudest achievement alongside the Declaration and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom; Jefferson was a passionate champion of individual liberties, freedom of conscience, and separation of church and state, yet the profound contradiction of his life was that he owned more than 600 enslaved human beings over his lifetime and never freed them, remaining deeply complicit in the institution of slavery even as he wrote and spoke of universal human freedom; his sprawling Monticello estate, his elaborate personal library (which became the nucleus of the Library of Congress after the British burned Washington in 1814), his scientific interests in botany, paleontology, meteorology, and architecture, his invention of the wheel cipher for coded messages, and his decades of correspondence with figures like John Adams and Alexander von Humboldt all testify to his extraordinary mind; Jefferson was also an accomplished violinist and wine connoisseur who introduced macaroni and cheese and waffles to the American dining table after encountering them in Europe; Cause of Death: Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826 — the 50th anniversary of American Independence — at his Monticello estate in Charlottesville, Virginia, at approximately 12:50 p.m., aged 83; his death resulted from a prolonged and painful deterioration of health in his final years involving multiple simultaneous conditions: severe and unrelenting chronic diarrhea causing dangerous dehydration and electrolyte imbalance; urinary obstruction most likely from benign prostatic hypertrophy (enlarged prostate), which required his physician Dr. Robley Dunglison to repeatedly dilate his urethra with a gum bougie, likely introducing significant bacterial infection; a resulting urinary tract infection and probable kidney damage including pyelitis; aggravated chronic rheumatism that had plagued him since the 1810s; and ultimately a terminal positional pneumonia developed during his final ten days of being bedridden and largely comatose, during which he reportedly roused briefly to ask those gathered at his bedside "Is it the Fourth of July?"; in a remarkable historical coincidence, his great rival and fellow Founding Father John Adams died the very same day in Quincy, Massachusetts, reportedly uttering as his last words, "Thomas Jefferson still survives," unaware that Jefferson had already passed away hours earlier; both men had initially planned to attend the grand 50th anniversary celebrations of Independence Day.