Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (Senior) was born in Nyangoma-Kogello, Siaya District, Kenya in 1936.  He was a member of the Luo tribe and grew up in the sleepy village of Alego-Kogello.

The myth is that Obama Sr. was a goat herder.

Obama Sr. may have herded some goats that were part of Grandfather's  extensive livestock collection, but Obama Sr. spent his time at school where he was actually an extremely bright student and sufficiently educated to go on to obtain degrees from the University of Hawaii and Harvard.

In 1955, at 18 years of age, Senior married a girl called Kezia from the local village.  It was Kezia who remained his one true love and to whom he always returned.

Senior seems to have inherited his father's attitudes towards the colonial power.  He was also arrested, for attending a meeting in Nairobi of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), the organization spearheading the independence movement.  Sarah told Obama that his father, unlike her husband, had been held only for a short time in the white man's prison: "Because he was not a leader in KANU, Senior was released after a few days."

Shortly after his arrest, in 1958, Obama Senior was awarded an American sponsored scholarship in economics to the University of Hawaii at Manoa.  He was selected by a former Kenyan cabinet minister, the late Tom Mboya, who was earmarked as the successor to Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's first prime minister and  leader of the terrorist Mau Mau.

The presumption was that Senior would return to Africa and use his "Western-honed skills in a new Kenya."

Chief Engineer found this 1960 "Time" article about Tom Mboya.  On page 8 it mentions the "Jackie Robinson -- Harry Belafonte Fund" which Susan Mboya oversees and which has already been used to send 81 Kenyans to the U.S. to be educated.

While Mboya has refused to release her father's papers, some of them may be among the personal papers and correspondence Mboya (father) had with students who participated in the airlift.  Those papers are at Stanford and personal correspondence is listed as one of the items in the holdings.

Of interest in the "Time" article, it mentions Pam Odede was sent to Ohio as one of the students.  Pam would later become Mboya's wife and it is no coincidence that their daughter Susan now lives in Ohio.

In June, 1959, at the age of 23, Obama Sr. became the first African student enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Kezia was a 16-year-old schoolgirl while Senior, two years older, had just got his first proper job as an office clerk in Nairobi.

Kezia said: "It was at a dance in Kendu Bay, my home town.  Barack (Senior) was there on holiday with his family.

"I went to the dance hall with my cousin William and I saw Barack enter the room.  I thought, 'ohhh, wow'.  He was so lovely with his dancing.  So handsome and so smart.

"We danced together and then the next day my cousin came to our house and told me that Barack liked me.

"It was December, so I was off school.  Each day Barack and my cousin would stop by the house.

"Every time I looked they were always there, trying to convince me to go with Barack to Nairobi.

"About a week later, William and I took Barack to the station.  We were going to say: 'Bye bye, see you next time.'  Except there was no bye bye.

"When the train arrived William and Barack said, "You are going to Nairobi."  I went with him.'

Her father, a local driver, was furious.

Kezia said: "He did not like Obama.  My father and brothers came to Nairobi to bring me back.  They said I had to go back to school.

"When I wouldn't, they said they would never speak to me again.

"Barack was also worried about what his father (grandfather) would think because I was so young, but he gave us his approval.  He sent my mother and father 14 cows for my dowry.

Kezia and Barack Sr. were married in a tribal ceremony in January, 1957, and  set up a home in Jericho, a section of Nairobi created for government employees, and began a family.

First son Roy was born in March 1958.  Kezia insisted: "Barack was a good husband."

The
Dunhams

The

Greatest

Stanley Armour Dunham was born 23 March 1918. , came from the oil-town of El Dorado, Kansas, the "other side of the railroad tracks."  He attended El Dorado High School and worked on oil rigs during the Depression.

Madelyn Lee Payne was born in Peru, Kan., on Oct. 26, 1922.  When she was 3, her family moved to Augusta, Kan., where she was raised.

Madelyn married Stanley Armour Dunham on May 5, 1940.  The newlyweds didn't tell her parents of the marriage until after she had her high school diploma in hand.

After the war Stanley became a retail furniture salesman.  He moved his family to Oklahoma, Texas, California and back to Kansas before they settled in the Seattle area in 1955. 

Although a Seattle Times article reports that the family rented an apartment in the Columbia City neighborhood of Seattle, records also show that the family lived in the Wedgwood Estates apartment complex, in one of four units at 7529 39th Avenue NE, during their first year in Washington state.  Stanley Ann Dunham attended 8th grade at Eckstein Middle School in the Wedgwood neighborhood.

He died in Honolulu on Feb. 8th, 1992.  He is buried at Punchbowl Cemetery because of his military service.  Madelyn died November 2, 2008.  Obama spread her ashes onto the sea from the cliffs of Hawaii.

Madelyn attended college at the University of Washington and then went to work on a bomber assembly line during WW II.  After the war, she attended UC-Berkeley, worked various jobs on the Mainland.  In 1960, when they came to the Islands, she joined the Bank of Hawaii.  She also volunteered in probate department of the Oahu Circuit Court House.

While Madelyn could be stern and tough at work, her personality changed around her husband.  A friend said he seemed like a real rough-and-tumble guy.  When Madelyn was with Stanley, she was very quiet.  He was the man of the house. 

The Dunhams had one daughter, Stanley Ann Dunham (Anna), who was born in  Wichita, Kansas, on November 29th, 1942.

The Dunhams moved to 3206 East Lexington St., Mercer Island, Washington in 1956,  after living in an apartment for a year in a nearby Seattle.  The lure was the high school that had just opened and the opportunity it offered for their daughter, who was then 13.

Stanley Ann Dunham's classmates, many of whom had lived on the island their whole lives, viewed Dunham as a novelty.

"She had a really ironic sense of humor, sort of downbeat and she was a great observer," said Iona Stenhouse, of Seattle, a former classmate.  "There was an arched eyebrow, or a smile on her face about the immaturity of us all.  I felt at times that Stanley thought we were a bit of a provincial group."

The diversions for Dunham and her class were solidly 1950s vintage: sock hops and sleepovers and the song "Rockin' Robin."  Dunham's father drove her and friends to boys basketball games, and would embarrass his daughter with his noisy cheering.

Dunham gravitated toward an intellectual clique.  According to former classmate Chip Wall, she caught foreign films at Seattle's only art-house theater, the Ridgemont, and trekked to University District coffee shops like the Encore to talk about jazz, the value of learning from other cultures and the "very dull Eisenhower-ness of our parents."

"We were critiquing America in those days in the same way we are today: The press is dumbed down, education is dumbed down, people don't know anything about geography or the rest of the world," said Wall, who later taught at Mercer Island High and is now retired in Seattle.

"She was not a standard-issue girl.  You don't start out life as a girl with a name like Stanley without some sense you are not ordinary."

At Mercer High School, two teachers -- Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman -- generated regular parental thunderstorms by teaching their students to challenge societal norms and question all manner of authority.  Foubert, who died recently, taught English.  His texts were cutting edge: "Atlas Shrugged," "The Organization Man," "The Hidden Persuaders," "1984" and the acerbic writings of H.L. Mencken.  Wichterman taught philosophy. 

The hallway between the two classes was known as "anarchy alley," and students pondered the challenging notions of Wichterman's teachings, including such philosophers as Sartre and Kierkegaard.  He also touched the societal third rail of the 1950s: He questioned the existence of God.  And he didn't stop there.  "I had them read 'The Communist Manifesto,' and the parents went nuts," said Wichterman, adding that parents also didn't want any discussions about "anything to do with sex," religion and theology.  The parental protests were known as "mothers' marches."

Stanley Dunham had wanted a son, so when his daughter was born, he named her Stanley Ann Dunham, after himself.

Known as Anna, Obama's mother, was a strong-willed, unconventional member of the Mercer Island High School graduating class of 1960.   She spent 8th grade through high school there.  Here is her application for a Social Security card, submitted when she was 16.  Stanley Ann Dunham was issued Social Security number 535-40-8522.

Although still married to Kezia in 1960, Senior may or may not have married fellow student Anna Dunham.  If so, Senior was now legally a bigamist.  Over his lifetime and through several wives, Senior eventually returns to Kezia.
 

The
Families
React

Spring

The Dunhams weren't happy with the union, but Barack Senior's father was furious.  He wrote the Dunhams "this long, nasty letter saying that he didn't approve of the marriage," Obama recounted his mother telling him, "He didn't want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman."

Six months after they wed, another letter arrived in Kenya, announcing the birth of Barack Hussein Obama, born Aug. 4, 1961.  Despite her husband's continued anger, Sarah Obama said in a recent interview, she "was so happy to have a grandchild in the U.S."

Click to see larger copy of Obama's Certification of Birth
Click that copy to see actual size copy.

The Obama campaign supplied a "Certification of Live Birth" to Markos Moulitsas Zuniga for posting on his Daily Kos site.  Kos says so in the comments.

From an analysis of the image and the text, it looks like this "certification" is presented as a true copy of an original, certified document, but it is  not a "birth certificate."

Years later, when Obama was in high school, he found a family stash of birth certificates and old vaccination forms.   Why wasn't his name there, or his mother's?  He wondered, he later wrote, "whether the omission caused a fight between my parents."

This is a very strange question.  Why would Obama, now in his teens, wonder about a conflict that may have happened when he was a year old?  What is he saying in this passage?

Is he saying there was no birth certificate for his mother and he, or is he saying something else?

Unless the voting public is given a real birth certificate to examine, the question of Barack's birth is still up in the air.

Shortly after Barack was born, Dunham and her new son moved to Seattle.  They lived in Apartment 2 of the Villa Ria Apartments at 516 13th Avenue E on Capitol Hill, and she enrolled at the University of Washington. But their stay was brief -- probably less than a year -- and in 1962 they returned to Hawaii.

FROM a DIFFERENT STORY (if same location): They lived in a three-story house that had been converted into three inexpensive apartments.  Toutonghi and her family lived in the basement apartment, and Ann Dunham -- Obama's mother -- lived in the apartment directly upstairs. 

FROM a 3RD story: Sum 1962 -- Sighting by John W. Hunt in June-Sept 1962 "I had moved to Utah for a while after high school, and I came back to Seattle in the summer of 1962.  I remember visiting the World's Fair, and then stopping by Stanley Ann's apartment on Capitol Hill.  It was a small apartment, upstairs.  It was after June, and could have been as late as September, 1962.  I visited her for half a day or so.  It was a...

In August, 1961, she enrolled in a University of Washington extension course.  Between August, 1961 and March 1962, she enrolled in a total of four extension courses at the University of Washington, earning a total of 20 credits for her work in those courses, no small feat, considering that graduation required 180 credits, and the typical full time student earned 45 credits a year.

It was a curious academic choice. Why would she enroll in extension courses at the University of Washington when she had found herself intellectually stimulated during her previous year of studies at the University of Hawaii?

It appears from the following item, that Anna returned to Hawaii between the Univ. of Washington's Winter semester and the Univ. of Hawaii's Winter semester.  I'll try to get an exact date, but for now, that would be around December 1962 or January 1963.

So it's fair to conclude that Anna was living in Washington during the period from August 1961 through January 1963.

In August or September of 1961, Senior enrolled and attended classes in his final undergraduate year at the University of Hawaii, from which he would graduate with a Bachelors Degree in economics and mathematics in June, 1962 -- after three years in Hawaii, as a Phi Beta Kappa straight-A student.

Some time between August 1961 and March 1962, Barack Obama Senior was accepted into Harvard's Ph d. program in economics.  He left Hawaii on June 22, 1962,  while his still-teenage wife and child remained in Seattle.

Obama's autobiography claimed Senior had rejected a scholarship at the Marxist New School for Social Research in New York City that would have paid for his family to come with him.  He chose to attend Harvard, where there was no allotment for his family.  Shortly after arriving at Harvard, and he took up with  Nidesand, who would become his third wife.

In "Dreams...," Obama claims that Senior left when he was two years old, when, in fact, Senior left before Obama was 1 year old.

A newspaper story on the day he left, June 22, said Obama planned a several-weeks grand tour of Mainland universities before he arrived at Harvard to study economics on a graduate faculty fellowship.  The story did not mention that he had a wife and an infant son.

Did Ann try to follow him to Cambridge?  Her friends from Mercer Island were left with that impression.  Susan Botkin, Maxine Box and John W. Hunt all remember Ann showing up in Seattle late that summer with little Barry, as her son was called.

"She was on her way from her mother's house to Boston to be with her husband," Botkin recalled.  "(She said) he had transferred to grad school and she was going to join him.  And I was intrigued with who she was and what she was doing.  Stanley (Anna) was an intense person ... but I remember that afternoon, sitting in my mother's living room, drinking iced tea and eating sugar cookies.  She had her baby and was talking about her husband, and what life held in store for her.  She seemed so confident and self-assured and relaxed.  She was leaving the next day to fly on to Boston."

But as Botkin and others later remembered it, something happened in Cambridge, and Stanley Ann returned to Seattle.

I believe the apartment located at 110 1427 Alexander St. was rented for Anna and Barack Jr. by her parents upon her return from WA state.  She remained there until just before she registered for spring classes at UH at Manoa in 1963.

This is the guy who Obama romanticized in his first book, writing, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself..." -- some role model -- Obama Sr. was a serial bigamist.  He abandoned all of his his wives and children.  He became a wife-beater and drunk.  His arrogance destroyed his government career.  He killed a man and lost both legs in alcohol-related accidents and eventually killed himself behind the wheel -- hammered!

Anna filed for divorce in 1964 (page 2 -- page 3 -- click to enlarge) and remarried two years later, when her son was 5.

In 1964, Obama Senior married his third wife, an American-born teacher called Ruth, who met at Harvard while still legally married to both Kezia and Ann and who followed him to Africa.

While studying for her bachelor's degree, Anna met another foreign student at the university.  She, and married Lolo Soetoro Mangunharjo in 1967.  Lolo would later become an oil company executive.

Lolo, who is a Muslim, promptly moved his new family to Jakarta, Indonesia, the worlds most populous Muslim country.  Obama lived in Indonesia for nearly five years as a child.  He had a pet ape named Tata, and sampled exotic foods -- dog, snake and grasshopper.

Lolo and Anna had one daughter, Obama's step-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng.  It is she who places Obama in Jakarta, Indonesia, from 1967 through 1972.

At the first sight of the old man Obama thought he seemed far skinnier than he had imagined him, and more fragile, with his spectacles and blue blazer and ascot and yellowish eyes.  It was not an easy month, and what stuck in the boy's memory was the basketball that his dad gave him as a present.

Obama would  describe his grandparents, the people who would raise him, as "white folk" and later, during the campaign would describe his grandmother as a "typical white person."
 

Madelyn Dunham, who Obama affectionately called "Toot," raised Barry Obama.  It was probably her money that got him admitted to the prestigious Punahou School in Hawaii and paid his fees.  Her efforts were formative, perhaps even more so than those of Obama's mother Ann, Madelyn's daughter.  And yet Madelyn is being hidden away, as Obama said, "somewhere in Hawaii."

Two years before Anna left Barry with her mother, in December 1970, Madelyn was named one of the first two female vice presidents at Bank of Hawaii.

It was a no-nonsense, serious workplace.  And Dunham had a reputation as a tough boss who quickly tested young management trainees.

"The first day I met her I was totally scared," Ching said. "She was the Grande Dame of escrow who started the local escrow association.  I was just a trainee who didn't know anything about escrow whatsoever.  But she gave me a file and said, 'You're a college grad.  Here, close this.'  You don't know how to swim and she throws you in and you either sink or swim."

And America's media have supinely allowed Obama to pretend he has no white relatives.  On may occasions, his Kenyan step-grandmother, Sarah, who never laid eyes on Obama Jr. until 1986, has been put on public display as "his grandmother." His real grandmother, who actually raised him,  has been put away in a closet.

The Chicago Tribune reports "the Obama campaign declined to make available."

Is this because she is white and Barry Obama is a "black" candidate for president or is it because she holds a secret.

The "segregation" of Madelyn Dunham, Obama's white grandmother, and only real grandmother, has to be one of the cruelest and most mendacious political kidnappings this nation has ever seen.

On the other hand, Stanley Dunham was in the habit of taking the 11-12-year-old Barry to a bar in the black "red-light district," the hangout of prostitutes and drug pushers, according to Obama's book.

According to his daughter, Auma, Obama Sr. was an alcoholic who was extremely found of Scotch".  He killed a man in a drunk driving accident in the early 1970's.

In 1982, Obama Senior killed himself in an alcohol-related car accident in Kenya, leaving three wives, one mistress, six sons and a daughter -- there is also the possibility of an eight progeny via a mistress.

Although Obama claims Obama Senior was an atheist, Obama Senior was buried as a Muslim.  The rival families of Obama's late father are still suing each other over his meager estate.

 
One of Senior's former drinking partners, Kenyan writer Philip Ochieng said that his friend's downfall was his weak character.  In fact he was a menace to life, said Ochieng.  "He had many extremely serious accidents.  Both his legs had to be amputated.  They were replaced with crude false limbs made from iron.

"He was just like Mr. Toad [from Wind In The Willows], very arrogant on the road, especially when he had whisky inside.  I was not surprised when I learned how he died."

"Although charming, generous and extraordinarily clever, Obama Sr. was also imperious, cruel and given to boasting about his brain and his wealth," he said.

Stanley Ann -- known names or aliases:

- Stanley Ann Dunham (maiden)
- Anna Dunham (her friends called her Anna)
- Anna Obama (after getting hitched to Obama Sr, in Washington phonebooks)
- Stanley Ann D. Obama (1964 Divorce)
- Ann Soetoro (in several quotes in that timeframe)
- Stanley Ann Soetoro (1980 Divorce)
- Ann Dunham Sotoro (Dissertation)
- S. Ann Dunham (Dissertation)

- ... and a few others I'm sure I'm forgetting ...

Obama has just about as many aliases and nicknames, with variants of Barack Obama, Barry Soetoro, Barry Obama, etc, as well...

Obama and Michelle Robinson of Chicago, Illinois were  married (October 18, 1992).  The ceremony was performed by Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Illinois. 

Michelle Robinson was born into a working-class family from the South Side of Chicago in 1964.  She graduated from Whitney Young High School in 1981 and majored in sociology at Princeton University, graduating cum laude in 1985.  She obtained her Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School in 1988.
 

The former owner wasn't willing to sell the house without the large chunk of land next to it, which Obama seemingly couldn't afford.

So Obama bought the mansion for $1,650,000 at a gigantic discounted price -- some $300,000 less than the asking price.

To finance the purchase, he secured a $1.32 million loan from Northern Trust in Illinois.

The freshman Democratic senator received an excellent discount.  He locked in an interest rate of 5.625 percent on the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, below the average for such loans at the time in Chicago.  The loan was unusually large, known in banker lingo as a "super super jumbo."  Obama paid no origination fee or discount points, as some consumers do to reduce their interest rates.

Compared with the average terms offered at the time in Chicago, Obama's rate could have saved him more than $300 per month.

The same day, Rezko's wife bought the adjoining lot, that can't be accessed from the public street, paying the full $625,000 asking price.

Six months later, Obama  bought approximately one-sixth of the Rezko property for $104,500,  so he could "extend his garden," leaving Rezko with a lot that can't be accessed from the street.  

Did Tony Rezko and his wife subsidize the purchase of Obama's opulent home?  Of the transaction, Obama wrote, "It was a mistake to have been engaged with him at all in this or any other personal business dealing that would allow him, or anyone else, to believe that he had done me a favor. For that reason, I consider this a mistake on my part and I regret it."

Mr. Obama turned to Mr. Rezko for help at several important junctures. Records show that when Mr. Obama needed cash in the waning days of his losing 2000 Congressional campaign, Mr. Rezko rounded up thousands of dollars from business contacts. In 2003, Mr. Rezko helped Mr. Obama expand his fund-raising for the Senate primary by being host of a dinner at his Mediterranean-style home for 150 people, including some whose names have since come up in the influence scandal.

Beyond that, what does it cost to refurbish, furnish and move into a $2,275,000 home -- another $500,000?

News and Commentary for Thinking People website published a 48-page document that lists William Miceli as the owner of the Obama family home at 5046 S. Greenwood, Chicago, IL 60615.
 

William Miceli is a lawyer at the Chicago law firm Miner, Barnhill & Galland, which also formerly employed Obama.

Miner, Barnhill & Galland was Obama's employer when he did extensive legal work for Rezko, who awaits sentencing after he was convicted in June of fraud, money laundering and bribery-related counts.
 

Phony grandma --"celebrity"

She clearly stole the show.  Many could not resist either posing for a photo with her, or taking her pictures, with the hope that in the next few months, they would brag to others that they once were with the US President's grandmother! (she's really not his grandmother!)

This was the first time Mama Sarah, who embraced the Obama family tradition, first saying she was a Muslim and then saying she was a Christian, attended an official function and going by the look of things, she is definitely going places (yeah, to the White House).

Meanwhile, Obama's real grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who raised him and put him through the prestigious Punahou School, remains a shadowy figure.  Hidden away by Obama's campaign, the woman that Obama described as a "typical white person" is, according to Obama, "somewhere in Hawaii."

Real grandma -- "typical white person"

In August, 2008, after delivering a campaign speech, Obama's first stop on his Hawaii vacation was a visit to his white grandmother's Makiki apartment, where he lived during his youth.

Obama traveled to Kenya to meet the family, for the first time, in 1986.

Obama's 40-year-old cousin Said Hussein Obama commented, "My cousin found it difficult when he came here to learn of his six half-brothers and sisters were born to four different mothers.

Obama's left hand is on the shoulder of Kezia, Obama Sr.'s first wife, who said, "The first time I met Barack Jr. was when he came to Kenya in 1985.  He was so much like his father, his looks, his voice, everything.  It was like seeing my husband all over again."