Ann Dunham - Early Life

Early Life

Dunham was born in Saint Francis Hospital in Wichita, Kansas, the only child of Madelyn Lee Payne and Stanley Armour Dunham. She was of predominantly English ancestry, with some German, Swiss, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh ancestry.

Wild Bill Hickok is her sixth cousin, five times removed. Ancestry.com announced on July 30, 2012, after using a combination of old documents and yDNA analysis, that Dunham's mother may have been descended from African John Punch, who was an indentured servant/slave in seventeenth-century colonial Virginia.

Her parents were born in Kansas and met in Wichita, where they married on May 5, 1940. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, her father joined the United States Army and her mother worked at a Boeing plant in Wichita. According to Dunham, she was named after her father because he wanted a son, though her relatives doubt this story and her maternal uncle recalled that her mother named Dunham after her favorite actress Bette Davis' character in the film In This Our Life because she thought it sounded sophisticated. As a child and teenager she was known as Stanley. Other children teased her about her name but she used it through high school, "apologizing for it each time she introduced herself in a new town". By the time Dunham began attending college, she was known by her middle name, Ann, instead. After World War II, Dunham's family moved from Wichita to California while her father attended the University of California, Berkeley. In 1948, they moved to Ponca City, Oklahoma, and from there to Vernon, Texas, and then to El Dorado, Kansas. In 1955, the family moved to Seattle, Washington where her father was employed as a furniture salesman and her mother worked as vice president of a bank. They lived in an apartment complex in the Wedgwood neighborhood where she attended Nathan Eckstein Junior High School.

In 1956, Dunham's family moved to Mercer Island, an Eastside suburb of Seattle. Dunham's parents wanted their 13-year-old daughter to attend the newly opened Mercer Island High School. At the school, teachers Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman taught the importance of challenging social norms and questioning authority to the young Dunham, and she took the lessons to heart: "She felt she didn't need to date or marry or have children." One classmate remembered her as "intellectually way more mature than we were and a little bit ahead of her time, in an off-center way", and a high school friend described her as knowledgeable and progressive: "If you were concerned about something going wrong in the world, Stanley would know about it first. We were liberals before we knew what liberals were." Another called her "the original feminist".