Author: Miss Cellania / Source: Neatorama
Sumter County in South Carolina is the home of a family enclave that has baffled outsiders since the Revolutionary War. The several hundred people of the community claim Turkish Ottoman roots, as descendants of Joseph Benenhaley, who served under General Sumter and was granted land after the war.
For over two centuries, they’ve kept to themselves, with six family names dominating the group.For many years the Turkish people’s origin story was usually considered no more than myth, a fable concocted to sustain an out-group through unpleasant realities of hard history. In 1973, a historian put it this way: “A stranger visiting Sumter County today may come across a baffling breed called ‘Turks’…. So meager are the facts relating to them that the wildest conjectures, based on what must surely be flight of…
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