Barack Obama was only a year old when John F. Kennedy, America's first Catholic president, landed in Dublin airport in the summer of 1963. The first official visit to Ireland from a US president, Kennedy was met by throngs of jubilant Irish men and women as he returned to his ancestral homeland 114 years after his great-grandfather fled famine and set off for America. Local policemen adorned in their best uniform - those without the latest issue weren't allowed near the presidential route – lined the streets, vainly attempting to push back the bustling crowds who excitedly greeted the leader of the free world. A photographer was brought to tears as Kennedy joined a choir of 300 boys as they sang ‘The Boys of Wexford', a ballad celebrating the Irish rebellion against British rule in 1798. Declaring Ireland to be the country closest to his heart, Kennedy would end his successful four-day visit a heroic figure to the Irish people, his visit etched in the fond memories of the republic.
About half of the people we spoke to were descended from slave owners and half from poor Irish immigrants.’
In 1850 Falmouth Kearney, the 19-year-old son of a shoemaker, left the Irish town of Moneygall for America, where he married Charlotte Holloway from Ohio. He was Mr Obama’s great-great-great-grandfather.
Barack Obam-aarrgh! The young 'Barry' dressed up as a pirate when he lived with his grandparents in Hawaii
Today, it would be difficult to find a more unlikely Barack Obama cheerleader than Jane de Montmorency Wright. The 75-year-old former Montessori supervisor, who worked in the school founded by Diane Guggenheim, has a long aristocratic lineage.
Her uncle, Sir Geoffrey de Montmorency, was governor of the Punjab from 1928 to 1933. At one point, the family owned a 4,800 acre estate including a mansion.
And, yet, Mrs Wright is Barack Obama’s cousin, well, sixth cousin, three times removed. That makes her his closest living Irish relative.
next generation of the family had to look abroad for work. Tom Kearney – the son of Joseph Jnr – emigrated to Ohio where he worked as a carpenter. His brother, William, remained at home and became a shoemaker, providing for the residents of Moneygall and Roscrea. He and his wife had two sons.
William named the eldest Joseph after his own father, and the younger Francis. Joseph followed his father into the family business and, in 1825, he married 21-year-old Phebe Donovan, a farmer’s daughter from Ballygurteen. They had a son, Falmouth, and a daughter, Margaret.
Francis, meanwhile, had joined his uncle Tom in Ohio, where he found himself a farm in the Appalachian Mountains in Pickaway County. But Francis’s life in Ohio was tragically short. He died, aged 44, in January 1848. In his will, he left his elder brother the farm.
Joseph Kearney sold off his family’s interests in Moneygall to raise the fare for his passage. Sailing from Liverpool on the Caroline Read, he arrived in America on April 25, 1849.
The following year, he was joined by his 25-year-old son Falmouth Carney and his daughter Margaret and her husband William Cleary. Falmuouth had also been working as a shoemaker in Moneygall. This trio also made their way directly to Ohio.
And so the Kearneys re-established themselves as farmers in Ross County, Ohio.
In 1852, Falmouth was married to Charlotte Holloway. Their great-grandson, Stanley Armour Dunham, was Barack Obama’s grandfather. Stanley, who passed in just 1992, apparently went by the name ‘Dunham Kearney’ in his younger years.
It’s a complicated history, but today the ancestors of a wigmaker called Michael Kearney can still be found on both sides of the Atlantic. In Moneygall there’s Henry Healy. In Bennettsbridge there’s Jane de Montmorency Wright.
And, of course, in the White House there’s Barack Obama.
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