African Americans inspired by Obama

Michelle’s family story points to a hidden side of the Irish-American experience

TO AMERICANS, Barack Obama will always be known as their country’s first black president. For that reason, many Americans were surprised by his visit to his ancestral home in Moneygall on Monday.

But the adoring reception he received there had little to do with his skin colour. He was the president of the United States. He was an extraordinarily charismatic politician in fine form. And he was another American exploring his roots in Ireland. That he was a black man seemed irrelevant.

Though Obama’s visit reinforced the sense of close ties between Ireland and the US, there are reasons to doubt the strength of his roots here. Genealogists say that he is probably at most about 5 per cent Irish and his closest relative in Moneygall is only an eighth cousin. However, Obama’s embrace of his Irish identity expresses a deeper truth about Irishness in the US today, which some commentators have described as an “optional ethnicity”. For recent Irish immigrants to the US, particularly the undocumented, being Irish is a powerful and inescapable force in their lives. But most of the millions of Americans who claim Irish identity have ancestors who emigrated two or more generations ago, as do I. For us, being Irish is a choice we can make, usually one among many.

Enda Kenny recognised this when he introduced Obama at College Green by extending a welcome to all Americans claiming to be Irish “whether by blood, or by marriage, or by desire.

A leading academic recently revealed that Irish immigrants and African Americans married more than any other ethnic groups in the U.S. in the 19th century. That slave owners and poor immigrant workers are the two main groups of Irish ancestors being uncovered by African American looking into their past, the Daily Mail reports.

Eneclann, the Irish heritage company who discovered Mr Obama’s Irish ancestry says, ‘About half of the people we spoke to were descended from slave owners and half from poor Irish immigrants.’

Mr Obama owes his ancestry to Jane de Montmorency Wright, his closest living relative as sixth cousin, three times removed.

Jane says: ‘I am the same generation as Obama’s great-grandparents on the family tree. And my seven grandchildren, the oldest of whom is 17, appear to be a generation older than the President,' as read in the Daily Mail.

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.