Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.

Barack Hussein Obama II born August 4, 1961 is the current President of the United States. He is the 44th President of the United States and the first African American to be elected to the office. Obama was the junior United States Senator from Illinois from 2005 until he resigned on November 16, 2008, following his election to the Presidency.

He is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate in January 2003, won a primary victory in March 2004, and was elected to the Senate in November 2004. Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004.

As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, he helped create legislation to control conventional weapons and to promote greater public accountability in the use of federal funds. He also made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. During the 110th Congress, he helped create legislation regarding lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, and care for U.S. military personnel returning from combat assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Barack Obama was born at the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women & Children in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Ann Dunham, a white American from Wichita, Kansas of mainly English, Irish and smaller amounts of German descent and her husband Barack Obama, Sr., a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya. His parents met in 1960 while attending the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign student. The couple married February 2, 1961; they separated when Obama was two years old and divorced in 1964. Obama's father returned to Kenya and saw his son only once more before dying in an automobile accident in 1982.

After her divorce, Dunham married Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro who was attending college in Hawaii. When Suharto, a military leader in Soetoro's home country came to power in 1967, all students studying abroad were recalled and the family moved to Indonesia.[10] There Obama attended local schools, such as Asisi, in Jakarta until he was ten years old. He then returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, while attending Punahou School from the fifth grade in 1971 until his graduation from high school in 1979.[11] Obama's mother returned to Hawaii in 1972 for several years, and then in 1977 went back to Indonesia, where she worked as an anthropological field worker. She stayed there most of the rest of her life, returning to Hawaii in 1994. She died of ovarian cancer in 1995.[12]
Right-to-left: Barack Obama and half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng, with their mother Ann Dunham and grandfather Stanley Dunham, in Hawaii (early 1970s)

As an adult, Obama admitted that he used marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol when in high school, which he described as his greatest moral failure at the 2008 Civil Forum on the Presidency.

Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Occidental College for two years. He then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations. Obama graduated with a B.A. from Columbia in 1983, then at the start of the following year worked for a year at the Business International Corporation and then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.

After four years in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago, where he was hired as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago's far South Side. He worked there for three years from June 1985 to May 1988. During his three years as the DCP's director, its staff grew from one to thirteen and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000. Achievements included helping set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute. In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time to Europe for three weeks and then for five weeks in Kenya, where he met many of his paternal relatives for the first time.

Obama entered Harvard Law School in late 1988. Based on his grades and a writing competition, at the end of his first year he was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. In February 1990, in his second year, Obama was elected president of the Law Review, a full-time volunteer position functioning as editor-in-chief and supervising the Law Review's staff of eighty editors. He was the first African American to be elected to that position. Obama's election as the first black president of the Law Review was widely reported and followed by several long, detailed profiles in national media. During his summers, he returned to Chicago where he worked as a summer associate at the law firms of Sidley & Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990. After graduating with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago.

The publicity from his election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relations. In an effort to recruit him to their faculty, the University of Chicago Law School provided Obama with a fellowship and an office to work on his book. He originally planned to finish the book in one year, but it took much longer as the book evolved into a personal memoir. In order to work without interruptions, Obama and his wife, Michelle, traveled to Bali where he wrote for several months. The manuscript was finally published in mid-1995 as Dreams from My Father.

Obama directed Illinois' Project Vote from April to October 1992, a voter registration drive with a staff of ten and seven hundred volunteers; it achieved its goal of registering 150,000 of 400,000 unregistered African Americans in the state, and led to Crain's Chicago Business naming Obama to its 1993 list of "40 under Forty" powers to be.

Obama served for twelve years as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, teaching constitutional law. He was first classified as a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and then as a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004. He also joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a twelve-attorney law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development, where he was an associate for three years from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004, with his law license becoming inactive in 2002.

Obama was a founding member of the board of directors of Public Allies in 1992, resigning before his wife, Michelle, became the founding executive director of Public Allies Chicago in early 1993. He served from 1994 to 2002 on the board of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which in 1985 had been the first foundation to fund the Developing Communities Project, and also from 1994 to 2002 on the board of directors of The Joyce Foundation. Obama served on the board of directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 to 2002, as founding president and chairman of the board of directors from 1995 to 1999. He also served on the board of directors of the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Center for Neighborhood Technology, and the Lugenia Burns Hope Center.

Family and personal life

Obama met his wife, Michelle Robinson, in June 1989, when he was employed as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin. Assigned for three months as Obama's adviser at the firm, Robinson joined him at group social functions, but declined his initial offers to date. They began dating later that summer, became engaged in 1991, and were married on October 3, 1992. The couple's first daughter, Malia Ann, was born in 1998, followed by a second daughter, Natasha ("Sasha"), in 2001.

Obama was known as "Barry" in his youth, but asked to be addressed with his given name during his college years.

Applying the proceeds of a book deal, in 2005 the family moved from a Hyde Park, Chicago condominium to their current $1.6 million house in neighboring Kenwood. The purchase of an adjacent lot and sale of part of it to Obama by the wife of developer and friend Tony Rezko attracted media attention because of Rezko's indictment and subsequent conviction on political corruption charges that were unrelated to Obama.

In December 2007, Money magazine estimated the Obama family's net worth at $1.3 million. Their 2007 tax return showed a household income of $4.2 million—up from about $1 million in 2006 and $1.6 million in 2005—mostly from sales of his books.

Obama playing basketball with U.S. military in Djibouti in 2006

In a 2006 interview, Obama highlighted the diversity of his extended family. "Michelle will tell you that when we get together for Christmas or Thanksgiving, it's like a little mini-United Nations," he said. "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher." Obama has seven half-siblings from his Kenyan father's family, six of them living, and a half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, the daughter of his mother and her Indonesian second husband. Obama's mother was survived by her Kansas-born mother, Madelyn Dunham until her death on November 2, 2008, just before the presidential election. In Dreams from My Father, Obama ties his mother's family history to possible Native American ancestors and distant relatives of Jefferson Davis, president of the southern Confederacy during the American Civil War.

Obama plays basketball, a sport he participated in as a member of his high school's varsity team. Before announcing his presidential candidacy, he began a well-publicized effort to quit smoking.

Obama is a Christian whose religious views have evolved in his adult life. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama writes that he "was not raised in a religious household." He describes his mother, raised by non-religious parents (whom Obama has specified elsewhere as "non-practicing Methodists and Baptists") to be detached from religion, yet "in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I have ever known." He describes his father as "raised a Muslim," but a "confirmed atheist" by the time his parents met, and his stepfather as "a man who saw religion as not particularly useful." In the book, Obama explains how, through working with black churches as a community organizer while in his twenties, he came to understand "the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change." He was baptized at the Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988.

Disclaimer - I am not responsible for the accuracy of the above information since it was compiled mostly from Wikipedia.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

First Generation:

1. Barack Hussein OBAMA was born on 4 August 1961 at (or close to) the Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein OBAMA, Sr. of Nyangoma-Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya, and Ann DUNHAM of Wichita, Kansas. His parents met while both were attending the East-West Center of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was enrolled as a foreign student. When Barack Obama was two years old, his parents divorced and his father moved to Connecticut to continue his education before returning to Kenya.When Obama was six, his mother married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian oil manager. In 1967, when Soetoro's student visa was revoked because of political unrest in Indonesia, Dunham and Barack, then in first grade, accompanied him to Jakarta, Indonesia. Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro was born after the family moved to Indonesia. Four years later she sent him back to the United States to live with his maternal grandmother.

Second Generation (Parents):

2. Barack Hussein OBAMA Sr. was born in 1936 in Nyangoma-Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya and died in a car crash in Nairobi, Kenya in 1982, leaving three wives, six sons and a daughter. All but one of his children live in Britain or the United States. One of the brothers died in 1984. He is buried in the village of Nyangoma-Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya.
3. Stanley Ann DUNHAM was born on 27 November 1942 in Wichita, Kansas and died 7 November 1995 of ovarian cancer.

Barack Hussein OBAMA Sr. and Stanley Ann DUNHAM were married in 1960 in Hawaii and had Barack Hussein OBAMA, Jr.

Third Generation (Grandparents):

4. Hussein Onyango OBAMA was born about 1895 and died in 1979. Before settling down to work as a cook for missionaries in Nairobi he was a traveler. Recruited to fight for colonial power England in World War I, he visited Europe and India, and afterward lived for a time in Zanzibar, where he converted from Christianity to Islam, family members said.

5. Akumu Hussein Onyango OBAMA had several wives. His first wife was Helima, with whom he had no children. Second, he married Akuma and they had the following children:

i. Sarah OBAMA
ii. Barack Hussein OBAMA, Sr.
iii. Auma OBAMA

Onyango's third wife was Sarah, the one often referred to by Barack as his "grandmother." She was the primary caregiver for Barack OBAMA Sr. after his mother, Akuma, left the family when her children were still young.6. Stanley Armour DUNHAM was born on 23 March 1918 in Kansas and died 8 February 1992 in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is buried in Punchbowl National Cemetery, Honolulu, Hawaii.

7. Madelyn Lee PAYNE was born in 1922 in Wichita, Kansas. She currently lives in Oahu, Hawaii.

Stanley Armour DUNHAM and Madelyn Lee PAYNE were married on 5 May 1940, and had: Stanley Ann DUNHAM

OK, now for John McCain’s Genealogy...

McCain’s genealogy records are OVER 4000 people strong, so I will not be able to cut and paste them herein like I was able to with Obama’s (due to limits in the Geni Forums). To view John McCain’s genealogy records, click this link and check them out --> http://www.gedview.com/mccain/ancestry.php
--------------------
Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. (born August 4, 1961) is the junior United States Senator from Illinois, a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, and author of two best-selling books. He is married to Michelle Obama, with whom he has two daughters.

Born to a Kenyan father and a white American mother, he spent most of his childhood and adolescent years in Honolulu, Hawaii. At age six, he moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, where he lived with his mother and Indonesian stepfather for four years. A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, Obama worked as a community organizer, university professor,[1] and lawyer before serving in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for U.S. Senate in January 2003. After winning a landslide primary victory in March 2004 to become the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 with 70% of the vote.

As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, he cosponsored legislation to control conventional weapons and to promote greater public accountability in the use of federal funds. He also made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In the current 110th Congress, he has sponsored legislation regarding lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, and care for returned U.S. military personnel. Since announcing his presidential campaign in February 2007, Obama has emphasized ending the Iraq war, increasing energy independence, and providing universal health care as top national priorities.
--------------------
http://www.wargs.com/political/obama.html Many interesting connections

Barack Hussein Obama II ( born August 4, 1961) of the Democratic Party won the nomination for the office of President of the United States in the 2008 general election. He is the first African American to be a major political party's nominee for this office. His namination acceptance speech was given August 28, 2008 at the Democratic Convention. Obama is currently the junior United States Senator from Illinois and President elect.

A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate in January 2003. After a primary victory in March 2004, Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He was elected to the Senate in November 2004 with 70% of the vote.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama

More about Barack Obama:

Barack Hussein OBAMA was born on 4 August 1961 at the Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein OBAMA, Sr. of Nyangoma-Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya, and Ann DUNHAM of Wichita, Kansas. His parents met while both were attending the East-West Center of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was enrolled as a foreign student. When Barack Obama was two years old, his parents divorced and his father moved to Connecticut to continue his education before returning to Kenya.When Obama was six, his mother married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian oil manager. In 1967, when Soetoro's student visa was revoked because of political unrest in Indonesia, Dunham and Barack, then in first grade, accompanied him to Jakarta, Indonesia. Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro was born after the family moved to Indonesia. Four years later she sent him back to the United States to live with his maternal grandmother.

Barack Obama graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he met his future wife, Michelle Robinson. They have two daughters, Malia and Sasha.