Note: Correction appended.

Dr. Eugene Foster, who died July 21 at 81, raised a fuss over presidential progeny that sloshed outside strictly historical circles when he showed through DNA testing that President Jefferson was the likely father of at least one child by one of his slaves, Sally Hemings.

Unschooled as a historian, Foster was a pathologist who worked for many years at the University of Virginia Medical School at Charlottesville, Va., and later Tufts University New England Medical Center at Boston. At the suggestion of a friend who’d become interested in the persistent rumor that Jefferson had fathered children with a slave, Foster analyzed the Y chromosomes of 14 male descendents of Jefferson’s close relatives. (Jefferson’s only son was stillborn.)

Published by Foster 1998 in the British journal Nature along with seven co-authors, the paper was titled “Jefferson fathered slave’s last child.” That was Eston Hemings Jefferson, born in 1808, and whose family had a long-standing oral tradition of being descended from the nation’s third president.

Many historians have come to feel that several more of Hemings’s six children were likely fathered by Jefferson, who historical records indicate was present at Monticello when the children were conceived.

In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Monticello, concluded, “it is very unlikely that any Jefferson other than Thomas Jefferson was the father of [Hemings’s six] children.” Later studies cast suspicion on Jefferson’s younger brother, Randolph.

The matter became further charged when the Monticello Association, whose members are descendents of Jefferson through his daughters, refused to accept Hemings’s descendents as full members. Some of Hemings’s descendents cried racism. A standoff continues.

Foster’s involvement with the story ceased after the publication in Nature, though he had a long-standing interest in civil rights.

Born in the Bronx and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1943, Foster attended medical school at Washington University in St. Louis, where he met his future wife, Jane Brown. Drafted by the military, he served as a doctor on Indian reservations in North Dakota and South Dakota. He later had residencies in pathology and surgical pathology.

He joined the pathology department at the University of Virginia Medical School in 1959. In 1976, he moved to Tufts, and in 1990 retired back to Charlottesville, which, according to a statement released by the family, “had become much more like a big city with more music and drama and a variety of dining options.”

It was a chance conversation over dinner in 1996 with family friend Winifred Bennett that inspired Foster’s investigation. Though not a historian or scientist, she had thoughts of publishing her own book on the topic, and her friendship with Foster ended after the Nature paper was published. It was a second unintentional controversy kicked up by Foster’s research.

“I really regretted that things worked out the way they did, but the project developed a life of its own,” Foster told the New York Times in 2006. “Winifred gets all the credit for originally having the idea of using DNA for this purpose.”

Foster, who is survived by three children of his own and his wife of 56 years, spent recent years doing volunteer work, including recording books for the blind and dyslexic.