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By Root 980 0

before expiring at age eighty-six, two days before the election. Her brother, a pioneer in the computerization of library data who had retired in 1995 as assistant director of the library at the University of Chicago, had chosen to ignore both a letter I had FedExed to his home and a message on his phone. When he slipped up one morning and answered the phone when I called, he said he had made a vow to himself not to talk to people like me. On the handful of occasions when he had made an exception, he said, he had gotten in trouble. We talked for ten minutes, circling each other. Then he said I could come, assuring me that the visit would probably not be worth my time. So, on a cold February morning when the wind barreled off Lake Michigan and snow lined the embankments along the rail line from O’Hare Airport, I was met at the door to Mr. Payne’s apartment on Lake Shore Drive by a slim, silver-haired, youthful-looking octogenarian (who had recently solved the problem of creeping weight gain, he later informed me, by eliminating lunch from his life). He had a pleasant but skeptical look on his face. It was the look of someone too civil by temperament and training to tell a nosy visitor to take a hike.

We sat across from each other at a round table in his spotless and clutter-free kitchen. The apartment was unique in the building, thought to have been custom-designed by the architect as a jewel box and a nest for himself; men who had come to restore the living room mantelpiece had once told Mr. Payne it appeared to be European and hundreds of years old. Mr. Payne began with a cautionary tale. In 2000, he said, he had thrown himself a seventy-fifth birthday party at the urging of his son, and had invited his three siblings. It was the millennium, after all; they had last all been together at their mother’s funeral, thirty-two years before. Madelyn, the retired bank vice president, arrived from Honolulu; Arlene, the retired university researcher in education and statistics, arrived from Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Jon, the former city planning director, arrived from Littleton, Colorado. Mr. Obama, then the Illinois state senator from the Thirteenth District, came with his wife, Michelle, and their daughter, Malia. “What I was struck by was that after all these years, the memories of our childhood were very different—memories of the same incident,” Mr. Payne told me. “Madelyn would remember one thing; Arlene would remember another thing. And neither one of them was correct, according to the way I remembered it.” He had noticed the same thing some years earlier while reading an oral history of the work of a Library of Congress task force that developed the first machine-readable standard for bibliographic data—a task force on which he had served. “I was just struck by how totally distorted people’s memories of that were,” he said. “And what I was particularly amused by was that each of them that I listened to turned out to be, more or less, the hero of the story: They innovated this, it was their idea to do this and that, they were the leader in so and so.”

He paused, looking at me evenly. Was he making himself clear?

“All of this is just to tell you: Don’t trust memory.”

It is impossible to reconstruct the earliest years of Stanley Ann Dunham and the stories of her parents, Stanley Armour Dunham and Madelyn Lee Payne, without trusting the memories of people who knew them. There is no authoritative history of the Dunham and Payne families and of the events that led them to the Flint Hills of Kansas in the first decades of the twentieth century. Genealogists have traced their ancestors back over two centuries to Indiana, Missouri, Virginia, Arkansas, the Oklahoma Territory, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Massachusetts. But the reliability of those family trees is uncertain. There are newspaper birth announcements, baptism records, high school annuals, military registration cards, marriage licenses, census records, city directories, newspaper articles, obituaries, death notices, funeral announcements.