Malik Obama - Maternal Relations

Maternal Relations

Barack Obama was raised by his mother Stanley Ann Dunham, called Ann, and grandparents Madelyn and Stanley Dunham. He often referred to his family during his candidacy and term as President.

Ann Dunham

Mother of Barack Obama, born in 1942; died in 1995. Born Stanley Ann Dunham, she was an American anthropologist who specialized in economic anthropology and rural development. She earned her PhD from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and worked with the United States Agency for International Development, the Ford Foundation, and Women's World Banking, to promote the use of microcredit in order to combat global poverty. The Ann Dunham Soetoro Endowment in the Anthropology Department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the Ann Dunham Soetoro Graduate Fellowships at the East–West Center (EWC) in Honolulu, Hawaii are named in her honor. Obama refers to his mother as the dominant figure in his formative years. "The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics."

Stanley Armour Dunham

Stanley Dunham is the grandfather of Barack Obama. He was born in 1918 and served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army during World War II, enlisting just after the attacks on Pearl Harbor. Stanley and his wife Madelyn raised Obama in Honolulu, Hawaii. In addition to Obama, Stanley is related to six US presidents: James Madison, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. He died in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1992, and is buried at the Punchbowl National Cemetery.

Madelyn Lee Payne Dunham

Barack Obama's maternal grandmother was born in 1922 and died on November 2, 2008. She was a bank vice president in Hawaii. Obama said that when he was a child, his grandmother "read me the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence and told me about the men and women who marched for equality because they believed those words put to paper two centuries ago should mean something." According to Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father, his great-grandmother Leona McCurry was part Native American, which Obama was told Leona held as a "source of considerable shame" and "blanched whenever someone mentioned the subject and hoped to carry the secret to her grave"; whereas her daughter (Obama's maternal grandmother) "would turn her head in profile to show off her beaked nose, which along with a pair of jet-black eyes, was offered as proof of Cherokee blood." To date, no concrete evidence has surfaced of Cherokee heritage. Obama's maternal heritage consists mostly of English ancestry, with much smaller amounts of German, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Swiss, and French ancestry. In July 2012, Ancestry.com published a report linking Obama through his mother to John Punch, believed to have been the first African enslaved for life in the Virginia colony, through a court punishment in 1640. Y-DNA testing of his Bunch descendants suggest that he was from Cameroon in West Africa.

Charles Thomas Payne

Great-uncle of Barack Obama, younger brother of Madelyn Dunham, born 1925. Served during World War II in the U.S. Army 89th Infantry Division. Obama has often described Payne's role in liberating Ohrdruf forced labor camp. There was brief media attention when Obama mistakenly identified the camp as Auschwitz during the campaign. In 2009, Payne spoke about this experiences:

"Ohrdruf was in that string of towns going across, south of Gotha and Erfurt. Our division was the first one in there. When we arrived there were no German soldiers anywhere around that I knew about. There was no fighting against the Germans, no camp guards. The whole area was overrun by people from the camp dressed in the most pitiful rags, and most of them were in a bad state of starvation."

Payne appeared in the visitor's gallery at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, when his great-nephew was nominated for President. He was the assistant director of the University of Chicago's Library.

Ralph Dunham

Great-uncle of Barack Obama, older brother of Stanley Dunham, born 1916. He served in the U.S. Army as an assignment and personnel officer during World War II, landing at Normandy's Omaha Easy Red Beach on D-Day plus four, working his way through France, Italy and Germany.

Lolo Soetoro

The second husband of Ann Dunham and stepfather to Barack Obama, born in Indonesia 1936, died 1987. He is the father of Maya Soetoro-Ng. After his divorce from Dunham, Soetoro married Erna Kustina. She bore him two children, Yusuf Aji Soetoro (b. 1981) and Rahayu Nurmaida Soetoro (b. 1984).

Maya Soetoro-Ng

Half-sister of Barack Obama, born August 15, 1970, in Jakarta, Indonesia. She has another half-brother, Yusuf, and a half-sister, Aya, from her father's second marriage. She is married to Konrad Ng, with whom she has two daughters, Suhaila and Savita. Maya Soetoro-Ng is a teacher in Hawaii.

Konrad Ng

Brother-in-law of Barack Obama, born 1974. He is of Malaysian Chinese descent, and his parents are from Kudat and Sandakan, two small towns in Sabah, Malaysia. Ng and his younger brother, Perry, were born and raised in Burlington, Ontario. Perry Ng works for the University of Ottawa. He married Maya Soetoro-Ng at the end of 2003 in Hawaii. They have two daughters, Suhaila and Savita. Konrad Ng is a US citizen. He is an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii's Academy of Creative Media. He studied philosophy at McGill University and cultural studies at the University of Victoria before he got his PhD from University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Robert Wolfley

Barack Obama's great-great-great-grandfather. He served as a private in Company A, 145th Ohio Infantry during the American Civil War. He is buried in the Olathe Memorial Cemetery in Olathe, Kansas.

John Punch

News sources reported in July 2012 that according to Ancestry.com, through research in a combination of historical documents and yDNA analysis, John Punch, first documented African slave in the American British colonies, has been documented as probably an eleventh great-grandfather of United States President Barack Obama through his mother, Ann Dunham, and her Bunch ancestors.

Jonathan Singletary Dunham

Born in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1640, Barack Obama's eighth great-grandfather was his earliest ancestor born in North America.