For years, millions of people have watched videos about a family from rural West Virginia whose unusual history attracted enormous attention online. Their story was repeatedly presented through sensational headlines, dramatic family-tree claims, and assumptions about their health and disabilities. But behind the viral videos are real people who have lived through poverty, family struggles, unwanted attention and complicated childhood experiences.

The family became widely known after photographer and filmmaker Mark Laita featured several relatives in his Soft White Underbelly videos. The recordings brought the household an enormous audience and, at times, financial assistance and offers of help. However, the attention also had a darker side, with relatives describing strangers coming to their property simply to stare, record them or provoke reactions.

Their family history does include documented marriages between close relatives in earlier generations. However, the commonly repeated label calling them “America’s most inbred family” is an internet and media description, not an official scientific designation. Experts also caution that disabilities or differences seen in individual family members cannot automatically be blamed on genetics without specific medical evidence.

The family in question is the Whittaker family of Odd, West Virginia — and the most revealing part of their story comes from the younger generation. Grandsons Brandon and Luis Whittaker have spoken about what it was actually like growing up around the family, including foster care, difficult relationships, childhood instability and the experience of strangers treating their home like a tourist attraction. Their accounts offer a very different perspective from the viral videos: this was never simply a story about unusual genetics, but about real people whose lives were dramatically changed after the world began watching them.