The New Yorker:

From 2016: In a tiny Irish village, one man will always be President.

By Chris Colin

During the eighteenth century, a wigmaker in Ireland could expect to have a prosperous career. Wigs were popular among the aristocracy, and useful in a pre-shampoo era. But the eighteen-hundreds brought a cold reappraisal of artificial hair. In the tiny village of Moneygall, on the border of Offaly and Tipperary, the Kearney family turned to shoemaking. By the arrival of the Great Famine, they’d joined millions of fellow-citizens who were hungry for a restart. When, in 1850, the Kearney family learned that a relative in America had bequeathed them a parcel of land, Falmouth Kearney, then nineteen years old, set out from his twelve-and-a-half-foot-wide house for Liverpool. There, he boarded a New York-bound coffin ship, so named for the high mortality rate among passengers. From New York, Kearney, an intense-looking man with a pressed-down mat of dark hair, made his way to Ohio, and married an Ohio woman named Charlotte Holloway. They had children and resettled, eventually, in Indiana, where Kearney worked as a farmer. Their youngest daughter had children of her own, and those children had children, and those children had children. One of the little Irish babies was Barack Obama.

The Irish roots of America’s first African-American President have a way of registering perpetually as a news flash. But it was back in 2007 that the world, and Obama himself, first learned about great-great-great-grandfather Falmouth. That year, a genealogist from Ancestry.com pieced together the family story with the help of a rector in Ireland who had access to church records from the nineteenth century. For the young senator from Illinois, this newfound heritage became occasional campaign-trail fodder; it was a hoot, and didn’t hurt with Irish-American voters.

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