Turks of South Carolina

The Turks of South Carolina are a group of people who lived in the general area of Sumter County, South Carolina. It is believed these people come from a primarily Native American background with some admixture of Middle Eastern Turkish. They have been mistakenly connected to a family of "Free Moors" who resided in CharlestonFree Moors of South Carolina. The tax collector of Sumter sent an inquiry to the South Carolina Committee on the Colored Population on December 7, 1858 inquiring whether the "descendants of Egyptians and Indians" who resided in Sumter should be taxed under the bracket of "Free Blacks, mulattoes and mestizos, or as whites."

History

The ancestors of this group of mixed-blood people are often referred to as having served as "scouts" under General Thomas Sumter, however the only references made as to Sumter's Scouts were that he often employed "Catawba Indians" for that purpose, and indeed was "often visited" by those Indians he had formerly employed. General Thomas Sumter gave land to Scott and Joseph Benenhaley (the original surname is believed to have been Ben Ali) near his plantation after the American Revolution. In the 1850s and 1860s several members of the "Turk" community filed affidavits of Indian descent with the Sumter County Clerk of Court claiming they were of "Catawba" descent. In the late 1880s McDonald Furman, an avid local historian, published numerous articles regarding the mixed-blood families of Sumter. Furman described their ancestry as "a large amount of Indian blood" and stated that the ancestors of the group originated from the "Catawba Indians." The Turks of South Carolina today include surnames such as Benenhaley, Oxendine, Scott, Hood, Buckner, Lowery, and Ray. Genealogy records show that several of their ancestors married Native Americans.

See also

• Melungeon