Obama family

The Obama family is a African American family out of South Side Chicago. The immediate Obama family carries mostly African American influences and primarily of African American (Michelle Obama), Luo, and English (Barack Obama) ancestry. The extended family of Barack Obama's maternal side also has smaller amounts of Irish and German roots.

The Immediate Family
Barack Hussein Obama

Obama, who is a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 U.S. presidential election was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii USA to Barack Obama, Sr. and Ann Dunham. His parents met while both were attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was enrolled as a foreign student. They separated when he was two years old and later divorced. Obama says he only remembers his paternal father from pictures and stories.. His birth father was a black immigrant from Nyangoma-Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya of the Luo tribe, and his mother was a European American of predominantly English stock from Wichita, Kansas, USA. Obama is of mixed background and mixed race. A scientific poll conducted by Sam Smith, who has covered Washington under nine presidents and edited alternative journals shows 55% of European Americans classify Senator Barack Obama as biracial when they are told that he has a white mother, while 66% of African Americans consider him black. Obama describes himself as black and African American, using both terms interchangeably, and is generally known around the world as an African American. Barack Obama's stunning political rise has had him serve in the Illinois State Senate, the United States Senate, and he is the first African American presidential nominee in U.S. history.

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, often referred by Barack Obama as his “Rock” is a Harvard educated African American lawyer and the wife of Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama. Mrs Obama descended mostly from Africans of the colonial American era. Michelle Obama traces her roots to the American South in the State of South Carolina. She was born in Chicago, Illinois to Frasier Robinson and Marian Robinson and met Barack Obama when they were the only two African Americans at their law firm and she was assigned to mentor him while he was a summer associate. Michelle's impressive resume includes: Former associate dean at the University of Chicago; a member of six boards of directors including the prestigious Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and Tree House Foods; and Vice President, Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals. In this position she was responsible for all programs and initiatives that involve the relationships between the hospitals and the community as well as management of the hospitals' business diversity program. Michelle's professional relationships were helpful when her husband in 2004, then a state senator, ran for the United States Senate, where he faced a primary dominated by some of the Democratic Party's most powerful political families. In his 2004 race, Obama had the support of influential black business leaders, most of whom had closer ties to his wife than they did to him. According to Newsweek, a former boss of Michelle Obama's, a powerful black woman Valerie Jarrett, chair of the Chicago Stock Exchange, served as finance chair of Barack Obama's U.S. Senate campaign. In the 2008 Presidential race Michelle is quickly gaining a reputation of being a no nonsense Midwesterner who speaks her mind. She has often drawn comparisons with former First Lady Hillary Clinton because of her involvement in many political decisions to date.

Malia and Sasha Obama

Sasha, age 6, and Malia, age 9 are the only two daughters of Barack and Michelle Obama. Their daughters are reportedly huge fans of Hannah Montana and Malia's favorite book is Harry Potter.

Notable members of extended family

Barack Hussein Obama Sr.

Barack Obama's father was born into a Muslim family in the Nyanza Province of Kenya with a stern father. The country of Kenya provided for Barack to attend the University of Hawaii with the promise that he would return to his homeland and improve the conditions of his people. Barack fell in love with a white American woman, named Stanley Ann Dunham. Barack Obama, Sr.'s son reports in his book a story about how his father used the power of his words respond to a white man, who negatively commented about Obama's skin color. Obama's eloquent choice of words prompted the white man to pay for all of Obama and his friend's drinks that day.

Barack left his wife and small child to obtain a PH.D. in economics at Harvard University, When his son was two he divorced Ann Durham and returned to Kenya. He later married another American woman, named Ruth. Together they raised two sons. Barack did not have much more to do with his first son, Barack, except through the occasional letter. Disappointed by not fulfilling his destiny as a great leader, Barack fell into hard times and became an alcoholic. He died in a car accident in 1992. His son Barack did not visit his father's homeland of Kenya until after his death.

Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro
Known as Ann, Stanley Ann Dunham is the mother of Barack Obama. One of her friends described Ann Dunham as "the original feminist, always patient, but quietly passionate in her arguments." After living in Kansas, Seattle Washington, and different locations, in Texas, her parents moved her to Hawaii.

Stanley Ann Dunham attended Hawaii State University and met her first husband, a Kenyan enrolled as a foreign student. The international union welcomed the first son for each of them naming him after his father, Barack Hussein Obama. After a short marriage of two years, Ann Dunham divorced her African husband. Ann later married Lolo Suetoro, an oil manager, who moved Ann and Barack to his homeland of Indonesia. During their brief marriage, Ann and Lolo produced a daughter named Maya. After her second and last marriage ended, Ann lived her final days in Wichita, Kansas until she died of ovarian cancer in 1995.Barack Obama's half sister'Maya Soetoro-Ng deposited of Ann's ashes in the Pacific Ocean on the southside of Oahu.

Madelyn Lee Payne and Stanley Armour Dunham
Madelyn Lee Payne was born in the oil boomtown of Augusta. Under protest from her strict Methodist parents, Madelyn secretly married her lifelong partner, Stanley Armour Dunham during her senior year of high school, but did not announce the marriage until her graduation day. They are the grandparents of Barack Obama.

After serving the Army in World War II, Stanley made good use of his charming demeanor and found his calling as a furniture salesman. Stanley Dunham's mother, Ruth Lucille Armour, was born in Illinois, became pregnant and married to her husband, Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham at the young age of 15. By the age of 18, she mothered two children and was living in in Wichita, Kansas -- far away from her family in Illinois. Ruth Amour committed suicide at the age of 29, when Stanley Armour was only 10 years old.

The family lived in Seattle, Washington, multiple towns in Texas and later crossed the Pacific Ocean to make a life in Honolulu, Hawaii. Stanley died on February 8, 1992, with his body buried in Punch Bowel Cemetery in Honolulu, Hawaii. Today Madelyn resides in Wichita, Kansas.

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