Chief Family Historian for Ancestry Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak got the assignment of a lifetime when it was discovered in 2007 that future President of the U.S. Barack Obama had Irish roots. Smolenyak’s job? To find out where in Ireland Obama’s family came from.
They had established that Obama was part Irish, and that his third great-grandfather on his mother’s side, Fulmoth Kearney, is his most recent connection to the Emerald Isle.
Naturally, the Irish wanted to know more. Not since John F. Kennedy had the Irish been so excited to learn about a U.S. president’s Irish heritage.
Smolenyak’s first task in tracing Obama’s precise link to Ireland was finding Fulmoth Kearney on the U.S. census and back-tracking his journey to the States. Luckily for the historian, Obama’s relative’s name was fairly unique, compared to say, a “Patrick Kelly.”
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