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Tracing Obama's Irish links

By
Denis Bergin,

Published Tuesday, March 10, 2009, 6:39 PM
Updated Thursday, July 23, 2009, 5:47 PM

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President Barack Hussein Obama is the newest member of an exclusive club of 20 U.S. presidents who claim Irish ancestry.

Obama's Irish great-great-great-grandparent, Falmouth Kearney, who left Moneygall in Co. Offaly in 1850, puts him at 13th position in an informal ranking, alongside James Polk and just ahead of Richard Nixon.

Obama is descended from Ohio and Indiana immigrants who came from the borders of Counties Offaly and Tipperary.

Obama is also a member of an even more select group of just four presidents whose fathers were born outside the U.S. And while Obama's father was born in Kenya, the other three presidential fathers were all born in Ireland; the parents of Andrew Jackson and James Buchanan, and the father of Chester Arthur.

Obama has a relatively close link to Falmouth Kearney because his great-grandfather Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham (Falmouth's grandson) was still alive for part of Obama's childhood. Ralph died in 1970 at the age of 76 when Obama was nine.

Ralph's mother, Mary Anne Kearney Dunham, was Falmouth Kearney's youngest daughter, and she was born in 1869. She was nine when Falmouth died in 1878, almost three years after he had arrived in America on the good ship Marmion.  Both herself and the man she married, Jacob, would later die on the same day in 1936.

However, while much of the spotlight has focused on Obama's direct relatives, the Kearney family has been in the U.S. since the early 1780s. The Kearneys had already started to emigrate despite the fact that the family was still prominent in Shinrone, a more extensive Co. Offaly community eight miles north of Moneygall.

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