Obama, Barack
He is a leading Democratic candidate for the presidential election in November, Illinois Senator Barack Obama has built his campaign platform on hope and change.
If successful, Obama will be the first man of African descent to inhabit the White House. He will not, however, be the first man of Irish ancestry to occupy the position.
Though it may come as a surprise to many, Obama can trace Irish ancestry on his mother's side back to one Falmouth Kearney from Monegall, County Offaly, whose father was a shoemaker. According to Church of Ireland rector Canon Stephen Neill whose investigation into Obama's Irish roots was prompted by a request from an Americans for Obama group based in Dublin, Falmouth emigrated to New York in the 1850s at the age of 19.
Falmouth's daughter Mary Ann Kearney, born in Tipton County, Indiana in 1869, married Jacob William Dunham, of Kempton, Indiana. The couple moved to Wichita, Kansas, where their great-granddaughter, Barack Obama's mother Ann Dunham, was born in 1942.
Barack Obama himself was born in Hawaii, where his mother's parents had moved and where she attended college and met Obama's father, Barack Hussein Obama from Kenya. The couple divorced when Obama was two.
Obama was educated at Columbia University. In 1991 he graduated from Harvard Law School where he was the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. In January of 2005 he was sworn into office as state senator in Illinois.
Obama's campaign remains strong in America, but the senator also has the support of the tiny Irish town of Offaly where locals celebrated the senator's victory in the Iowa caucus. Standing outside of Ollie Hayes's pub, American Democratic activists led locals in the signature Obama cheer, "Fired Up! Ready to Go!"
Barack Obama lives on the South Side of Chicago with his wife Michelle and their two daughters Malia and Sasha.
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