recalled that it did not succeed economically. Training as a blacksmith under his older brother Little George, Isaac added to his skills. Sometime after 1794, he became a nailer as well, and was assigned to both nail making and smithing. Marriage and family By 1796, Granger had a wife named Iris and a son Joyce. He was working extra hours in the blacksmith shop to make chain traces, for which Jefferson paid him three pence a pair. According to Jefferson's records, Granger was a most productive nailer. In the first three months of that year, he made 507 pounds of nails in 47 days, wasting the least amount of nail rod in the process. He earned the highest daily return for his master: the equivalent of eighty-five cents a day. Moving from Monticello In October 1797, Thomas Jefferson gave Isaac, his wife Iris, and their sons Joyce and Squire to his daughter Maria and John Wayles Eppes as part of their marriage settlement. This was customary practice in those years by planters who had sufficient slave holdings. He also gave the Eppes the 14-year-old slave Betsy Hemmings, who would serve as their children's nurse and became the matriarch of the slave society at the Eppes plantation, Mont Blanco, in Chesterfield County. When Jefferson's son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph needed a blacksmith, he leased Isaac from Eppes. Isaac and his young family moved from Eppes's plantation, Millbrook, in Buckingham County to the Randolph plantation of Edgehill in Albemarle County in 1798. Their daughter, Maria, was born soon after. Isaac's memoir suggests that he lived at Monticello during Jefferson's retirement years. He and his family may have been chosen to accompany Martha Jefferson Randolph and her children there in 1809, when she moved to help her father. In 1799 and 1800, Isaac's parents and brother Little George all died within a few months of each other. While ill, the family members consulted a black conjurer living in Buckingham County. (This showed the persistence of African traditions within the slave community.) Shortly after Great George's death, Thomas Jefferson gave Isaac $11, the value of "his moiety of a colt left him by his father." In 1812 an Isaac belonging to Thomas Mann Randolph ran away and was caught and imprisoned in Bath County. It is unknown whether this was Isaac the blacksmith. Randolph had records of owning at least one other Isaac in this