Presidential candidate Obama has Irish kin in southern Ohio

[Algorem]

http://blog.cleveland.com/openers/2008/10/kin.html
Sunday, October 05, 2008
Margaret Bernstein
Plain Dealer Reporter

New Holland, Ohio- Joshua Rea, 30, heard the news while having a bite at CC's White Cottage restaurant. "This is crazy, man," he said incredulously, reaching for a phone to call his dad.

"Obama's ancestors lived right down the road," he told his father, a local farmer. "Our ancestors were probably kicking it with his ancestors."

Here in rural Pickaway County, 30 minutes south of Columbus, word is spreading that a pair of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's ancestors are buried just a few miles away and that the Democratic nominee has loads of distant relatives living in southern Ohio. All of them are white.

Rea and plenty of other diners at the White Cottage admitted it comes as a big surprise to hear that Obama, often regarded simplistically as the black candidate for president, is related, on his mother's side, to the Kearney family, who migrated from Ireland two centuries ago and were early settlers in this part of the state...




ELECTION 2008: Obama's Ohio roots

http://blog.cleveland.com/pdgraphics/2008/10/election_2008_obamas_ohio_root.html

Posted by Joel Downey October 03, 2008 22:25PM

Click on image to download PDF.

By Margaret Bernstein | The Plain Dealer

Barack Obama comes from a long line of Kearneys who chain-migrated from Ireland to Ohio throughout the 19th century. The family owned acres of farmland near the intersection of Ross, Pickaway and Fayette counties.

One of the first Kearneys to arrive here, Francis, who died in 1848, bequeathed land in Ohio to his brother Joseph, who is Obama's great-great-great-great-grandfather.

In 1849 Joseph came from Moneygall, Ireland, to the United States to claim his land, records show. A year later, two of Joseph's children, Fulmoth and Margaret, arrived from Ireland on the ship S.S. Marmion and joined several Kearney cousins and uncles already in Ohio.

Fulmoth, the great-great-grandfather of Obama's mother, married a woman from a large Ohio family, Charlotte Holloway, giving Obama even deeper roots in the southern part of the state. Fulmoth and Charlotte later moved to Indiana, but Fulmoth's parents, Joseph and Phebe, remained on the family land, and are buried in a tiny cemetery in Fayette County.

Download the graphic to follow the family tree.


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'Race: Are We So Different' exhibit opens at Cleveland Museum of Natural History

http://www.cleveland.com/plaindealer/stories/index.ssf?/base/living-1/1221985889292440.xml&coll=2
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Margaret Bernstein
Plain Dealer Reporter

Can a museum exhibit rock your world? Cause you to question your core beliefs and instill an urge to go debrief with the nearest somebody?

"Race: Are We So Different?" the ambitious exhibit that arrives here Saturday for a three-month stay at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, is determined to try.

It starts off with a wallop of a message, brought to you by the American Anthropological Association and the Science Museum of Minnesota, which is basically: Guess what? The racial identities that you've spent your life assigning to yourself and other people? They're more imagined than real.

Three years ago, when officials at Cleveland's natural history museum first learned about the exhibit, they instantly agreed to bring it to Cleveland, spokeswoman Marie Graf said. They found themselves intrigued by the way th...

[glowing]

1. Ahh, the Irish.. I guess, we should send him a green shirt next st. Patty's day

that says, "Kiss me, I'm Irish".. his wife probably won't be happy. Cool find.

[Hope And Change]

2. K & R!