Barack Obama Family History

Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th President of the United States, was born on August 4th, 1961 to Barack and Ann Obama in Honolulu, Hawaii.

His place of birth became a contentious “birther” issue when he was campaigning for US President.  But it was settled after he produced his birth certificate that gave his place of birth in the 50th state of the Union.

Even so, Barack was soon to leave the United States.  His parents’ marriage dissolved.  In 1965 Ann married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian graduate student in Hawaii, and she and Barack (then aged six) followed Lolo to Jakarta, Indonesia in 1967.  Barack was to spend four years there before returning to Hawaii.

Barack returned in 1971 to stay for the most part with his mother’s parents in Hawaii.  He graduated from high school in 1979 and attended college, first in Los Angeles and then at Columbia University in New York.  In 1988 he was accepted at Harvard Law School where he completed his studies with a Juris Doctor magna cum laude.

Chicago.  It was Chicago which made him what he was to be.  While practicing law in Chicago he met Michelle Robinson and they married in 1992.  She was to be his helpmeet for the challenging years ahead.  His first venture into politics came when he was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, representing Chicago’s South Side.

The year 2004 saw the first evidence of his popular appeal as a political candidate.  He won the Illinois Senate seat with a resounding 70 percent share of the vote.

Three years later, his sights were even higher.  Despite his relative youth and inexperience, he announced his candidacy for President of the United States.  In the Democratic primaries he defeated Hillary Clinton, in the Presidential election John McCain.  He had selected Joe Biden as his Vice Presidential candidate.

President and Post-President.  Barack Obama served two terms as US President, presiding from 2009 to 2017.  He entered the White House under a wave of optimism.

He soon had to deal with the effects of the 2008 financial crash.  However, his greatest achievement may well have been in healthcare.  He presided over the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, during his first term.

Barack left office in 2017 with high approval ratings in the United States and in the wider world.  Post-President, he has continued to live in Washington DC being politically active, although in a quiet and measured way.  He remains a respected figure within the Democratic Party.

Black and White

Barack Obama may have been the first African American President in US history.  But there is both black and white in his genes:

• black on his father’s side who was Luo Kenyan from Africa
• and white on his mother’s side, English in America from early colonial times but with Irish, Welsh and German strains.

Recalling his early childhood, Barack said: “My father looked nothing like the people around me – that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk – barely registered in my mind.”

When he was in high school in Hawaii, he was known as Barry rather than his given name of Barack.  He struggled at that time to reconcile the social perceptions of him with his multiracial background.

Dreams From My Father

Barack hardly knew his father.  He had left their home in Hawaii when Barack was two and there was just one brief visit there when he was eight.

He went to Kenya as a young man in 1988, but that was after his father had died.  He did have some image of his father from the stories told by his mother and maternal grandparents.  So his early memoir, published in 1995, had the title Dreams From My Father.

Obamas in Kenya.  Barack’s father came from Kenya and from the Luo people who have traditionally lived in southwest Kenya and northern Tanzania.   Numbering about five million today, they have their own Luo language.

The Obamas of Barack’s family once held ancestral Luo land at Alego in western Kenya near Lake Victoria.

Their patriarch still remembered is Onyango Obama.  He had been born in colonial Kenya sometime around 1895.  As a young man he had learnt to speak, read and write in English, the language of his British masters.  He worked as a mission cook and as a herbalist and joined the King’s African Rifles during World War One.

After World War Two the British suspected him as a Mau Mau terrorist and imprisoned him in 1949.  He was tortured and generally mistreated during that time.   In his memoir Barack recounted the family descriptions of his grandfather’s shocking state after his release:

“When he returned home he was very thin and dirty.  He had difficulty walking and his head was full of lice.  For some time he was too traumatized to speak about his experiences.  His wife said that, from that day on, she saw that he was an old man.”

Onyango lived in Nyang’oma Kogelo village on the edge of Lake Victoria, some 30 miles west of western Kenya’s main city Kisumu.  He was married three times.   His second wife Akumu was the mother of his son Barack Obama.  But she abandoned the family and departed for Tanzania.  Barack Sr. was then brought up by Onyango’s third wife Sarah. 

Granny Sarah, as she became known, lived to the grand age of ninety-nine years and died in 2021.  Barack met with her during his visit to Kenya in 1988.

Barack’s Father.  Barack Obama Sr. grew up in the village of Nyang’oma Kogelo with its few hundred people.  Around the year 1960 he was selected for a special program to attend college in the United States.  He studied at the University of Hawaii.

The foreign student advisor there had the following comment about him:

“The subject has been running around with several girls since he first arrived here.  Last summer she cautioned him about his playboy ways.  The subject replied that he would ‘try’ to stay away from the girls.”

Over his lifetime Barack Sr. was married four times:

• to Keizia Aoko back in Kenya in 1954
• to Ann Dunham, Barack’s mother, in Hawaii in 1961
• to Ruth Baker, a teacher, in Massachusetts in 1964
• and to Jael Atieno, a secretary, in Nairobi, Kenya in the 1970’s.

His relationships overlapped in complicated ways and his personal life was turbulent.  It was marked by frequent separations and moves between Kenya and the United States.

He had first met Barack’s mother Ann in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa.  He was twenty-seven at the time and she eighteen.  The couple married in Wailuku, Hawaii in February 1961, six months before Barack was born.

Barack Sr. and Ann divorced in 1964 and he returned to Kenya.  He only visited his son Barack one more time after that, at Christmas in 1971.

He died in Kenya in a road accident in 1982.  After his death his ex-wives and children went to court to figure out who were his legal heirs.  The dispute went on for years.

Barack’s Stepfather.   Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian graduate student in Hawaii, was Ann’s second husband whom she married in 1965.  She and her young son Barack followed him to Indonesia two years later.

Barack got to know Lolo better than his real father.  During his four years in Indonesia, Barack said that he taught him how to be resilient and gave him “a pretty hardheaded assessment of how the world works.”

American Ancestry

Early History.  Barack’s maternal line goes back to the early English colonization of America.  John Dunham from Bedfordshire in England came to the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts via Leiden in Holland in 1630.  There was a strong Puritan streak in these Dunhams which later became Methodist.

Barack’s line from the immigrant John Dunham ran as follows:

• John Dunham from Bedfordshire in England (1588-1668) m. Susan Cainehoe
• Benajah Dunham from Plymouth, Massachusetts (1637-1680) m. Elizabeth Tilson
• Rev. Edmund Dunham from Plymouth, Massachusetts (1661-1734) m. Mary Bonham
• Rev. Jonathan Dunham from Piscataway, New Jersey (1693-1777) m. Jane Pyatt
• Samuel Dunham from Piscataway, New Jersey (1730-1807) m. Mary Lucas
• Samuel Dunham from Piscataway, New Jersey (1752-1822) m. Hannah Chenoweth
• Jacob Dunham from Virginia (1794-1865) m. Catherine Goodnight
• Jacob Dunham from Berkeley, West Virginia (1824-1907) m. Louise Stroup
• Dr. Jacob Dunham from Tipton, Indiana (1850-1906) m. Mary Kearney

The Dunhams moved over the years to New Jersey, Virginia, and Indiana.  It was Dr. Jacob Dunham who came to Kansas prior to his marriage to Mary Kearney in 1888.  Mary Kearney, born in 1869, was descended from Fulmoth Kearney, an Irish immigrant who had left Offaly in Ireland in 1850 at the time of the Potato Famine.

Kansas.  The Dunham line in Kansas went as follows:

• Dr. Jacob Dunham (1850-1906) m. Mary Kearney in  Labette, Kansas in 1888
• Ralph Dunham (1894-1970) m. Ruth Armour and later Martha Stonehouse, both in Wichita, Kansas
• Stanley Dunham (1918-1992) m. Madelyn Payne in Wichita, Kansas

Jacob and Mary raised seven children, three boys and four girls.  The boys would find work in the developing aircraft industry in Wichita in the 1920’s.

Ralph’s son Stanley had a difficult childhood.  In 1926, at the age of eight, he discovered the body of his dead mother after she had committed suicide by poisoning.  He became unruly at school and then, as the Great Depression took hold, started drifting – hopping on rail cars to Chicago and California and back again.

In time he returned to Kansas where he married Madelyn Payne in 1940 on the night of her senior prom.  Madelyn had Welsh antecedants, from Henry Perry who first arrived in Ohio in 1803.

Stanley found work in post-war America in the furniture industry, either running his own store or acting as salesman.  They moved around a lot.  In Seattle Madelyn became Vice President at a local bank.

Hawaii.  Madelyn received a job offer in 1960 from the Bank of Hawaii and the family, including their daughter Ann, moved there.

Starting in 1971, Stanley and Madelyn brought up Ann’s son Barack, then aged ten, at their Honolulu apartment.  In his memoir Dreams From My Father, Barack described his grandparents as “stern Methodist parents who did not believe in drinking, playing cards, or dancing.”

Stanley died in 1992.  Madelyn lived on until 2008.  Barack said the following about her in a TV interview:

“She never got a college education, but is one of the smartest people I know.  She’s where I get my practical streak. That part of me that’s hardheaded, I get from her.  She’s tough as nails.”

Barack’s Mother.  Their daughter Ann was at the University of Hawaii in 1960 when she met and married Barack Sr. Their son Barack was born a year later.

Her second marriage, to Lolo Soetoro from Indonesia in 1965, resulted in her leaving Hawaii for Jakarta two years later.  There she continued her studies in anthropology and embarked on a professional career, mainly based in Jakarta.  She returned to Hawaii for three years in the mid-1970’s to complete her anthropology degree.  Otherwise she was mainly absent from her son Barack’s life.

Ann died of cancer in Jakarta in 1994, aged fifty-two.  Barack spread his mother’s ashes in the Pacific Ocean at Lanai Lookout on the south side of Oahu.  Fourteen years later he scattered the ashes of Ann’s mother Madelyn at the very same spot.

Barack Obama’s Family Tree

• Paternal Obama Side

• Hussein Onyango Obama from Nyanza, Kenya was married – (1) to Nyaoke, (2) to Habiba Akumu ((1918-2006) in 1932 who left him, and (3) to Sarah Ogwei (1922-2021) in 1941
• – Barack Obama (1934-1982), with Akumu (brought up by Sarah)
• – and daughters Sarah and Auma Obama, with Akumu (brought up by Sarah)
• – Omar, Zeifuni, Yusuf and Sayid Obama, with Sarah

• Barack Obama Sr. from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Kenya was married four times – (1) to Keizia (Grace) Aoko (b. 1940-2021) in Kenya in 1954, separated in 1960 (2) to Ann Dunham from Kansas (1942-1995) in Hawaii in 1961, divorced in 1964, and (3) to Ruth Beatrice Baker (b. 1937) in Massachusetts in 1964, returning to Kenya, divorced in 1973.  Ruth rem. Simeon Ndesandjo.  Barack rem. (4) Jael Atieno in 1970’s and died in a car accident in Kenya in 1982.
• – Abongo (Roy) and Auma Obama (b. late 1950’s) born in Kenya, with Keizia
• – Barack Obama (b. 1961) born in Hawaii, with Ann
• – Mark Ndesandjo born Obama (b. 1965), born in Kenya, with Ruth
• – David Ndesandjo born Obama (b. 1968), born in Kenya, with Ruth
• – George Obama (b. 1970’s), born in Kenya, with Jael

• Lolo Soetoro, geographer from Indonesia, Barack’s stepfather (1935-1987) m. Ann Dunham  (1942-1995) in Hawaii in 1965.  They moved to Jakarta in 1967, but divorced in 1980.  Lolo rem. Erna Kustina (b. 1945) in Jakarta in 1980.
• – Maya Soetoro (b. 1970), born in Jakarta, with Ann
• – Bayu Soetoro (b. 1981), with Erna
• – Rahayu Soetoro (b. 1984), with Erna

• Barack Obama m. Michelle Robinson from Chicago (b. 1964) in Chicago in 1992
• – Malia Obama (b. 1998)
• – Sasha Obama (b. 2001)

• Maternal Dunham Side

• Dr. Jacob Dunham from Tipton, Indiana (1850-1906) m. Mary Kearney (1869-1936) in Labette, Kansas in 1888
• – Hattie Dunham (1889-1950) m. Louis Herrington
• – Mabel Dunham (1891-1977) m. Hugh Whitney
• – Frank Dunham (1892-1971) m. Pearl Messenger
• – Ralph Dunham (1894-1970)
• – Pearl Dunham (1897-1970) m. Leroy Jackson
• – Christobel Dunham (1897-1965) m. Lee Phipps
• – Earl Dunham (1899-1980)

• Ralph Dunham from Kansas m. Ruth Armour (1900-1926) in Wichita, Kansas in 1915;.  Ruth died by suicide and Ralph rem. Martha Stonehouse (1900-1972) in Wichita, Kansas in 1928
• – Ralph Dunham (1916-2012) m. Elizabeth (Betty) Smith, with Ruth
• – Stanley Dunham (1918-1992), with Ruth
• – Eleanor Dunham (1932-2003) m. Ralph Berkebile, with Martha
• – Virginia Dunham (1935-2023) m. Cecil Goeldner, with Martha

• Stanley Armour Dunham from Kansas, furniture salesman (1918-1992) m. Madelyn Payne, banker (1922-2008) in Wichita, Kansas in 1940 and moved to Hawaii in 1960
• – (Stanley) Ann Dunham (1942-1995)

• Ann Dunham from Kansas m. Barack Obama Sr. from Kenya (1934-1982) in Hawaii in 1961, divorced in 1964;  rem. Lolo Soetoro from Indonesia (1935-1987) in Hawaii in 1965.  They moved to Jakarta in 1967, but divorced in 1980.  Lolo rem. Erna Kustina (b. 1945) in Jakarta in 1980.
• – Barack Obama (b. 1961), born in Hawaii, with Barack Sr.
• – Maya Soetoro (b. 1970), born in Jakarta, with Lolo