Continue reading at linkThe surviving Whittaker family tree is currently comprised of siblings Betty, Lorraine and Ray, as well as cousin Timmy, after their brother Freddie died of a heart attack. However, there is reportedly an unnamed sister and other family members who Laita never met.
Of the three remaining relatives, only Timmy graduated high school.
During his flagship visit, the camera-wielding raconteur was approached by a shotgun-toting neighbor, who threatened to use it if the production team didn’t leave them be.
“They don’t like people coming to ridicule these people,” said Laita, who was eventually allowed to snap pictures despite the initial distrust.
Laita analogized the scene to something out of “Deliverance,” director John Boorman’s chilling, Oscar-nominated 1972 film about dueling-banjo mountain folk that’s based on the James Dickey novel of the same name.
“There’s these people walking around and their eyes are going in different directions and they are barking at us,” the astonished chronicler explained, “The one guy you’d look at him in the eye or say anything and he’d scream and go running away and his pants would fall around his ankles and he’d go running off and go kick the garbage can. This would happen over and over.”
Meet the Whittakers: Inside ‘America’s most inbred family’ that speaks in grunts
Their family tree is self-pollinating: Inside the lives of a heavily-inbred West Virginia family that only communicates in grunts and barks at passersby.
nypost.com
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