United States President Barack Obama has Irish ancestry, according to the UK version of Ancestry.com. This discovery comes from research by genealogists. Anytime there is information about the family tree of the President, it seems to make headlines.
Genealogists at Ancestry.co.uk traced the descendants of a man named Falmouth Kearney. At the age of nineteen, Mr. Kearney left Ireland and traveled to the United States. He did this sometime during the Potato Famine, so one could assume that he immigrated around 1850 or so. The genealogists learned that Falmouth Kearney arrived in New York along with his brother-in-law, William, and his wife, Margaret Cleary. They headed towards Ohio, and eventually settled in Indiana, where they became farmers. Falmouth Kearney had ten children.
President Obama is a descendant of Falmouth Kearney. A shortened version of his family tree shows that Barack Obama’s mother is Stanley Ann Dunham. Her father, Obama’s grandfather, was Stanley A. Dunham. Obama’s great grandfather is Ralph Emerson Dunham. His second great grandmother was a woman named Mary Ann Kearney, who is a daughter of Falmouth Kearney himself.
The same research allowed other members of Ancestry.com to discover that they, too, were descendants of Falmouth Kearney. Some people may have been pleased with this news, while others were less than happy about it. Those whose political views didn’t match those of President Obama were not very enthused to be related to him.
Genealogists at Ancestry.co.uk were not only looking for Falmouth Kearney. They were studying how Irish immigrants have made an impact in the United States. Somewhere around 1.7 million Irish immigrants came to the United States between 1840 and 1850, when the Great Potato Famine was devastating Ireland. The genealogists traced the descendants of the 23 other Irish passengers who were on the Marmion ship that brought Falmouth Kearney to America.
One can only imagine what an Irish immigrant, who arrived in America with very little, would think if he knew that one of his descendants would become the President of the United States, all these years later. I imagine that Falmouth Kearney might, potentially, be surprised that his descendant also had Kenyan heritage. In the past, there has been a group of people who continually question President Obama’s citizenship, even though there are records that say he was born in Hawaii. I wonder what that group will say now that we know that President Obama is part Irish.
Image by Rennett Stowe on Flickr