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By Root 970 0

But the public record offers only a frame without color, texture, or emotion, like the vestigial adhesive corners left behind in old albums after the photographs have faded or fallen away. There is President Obama’s sweet and lyrical account of his grandparents’ story in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, woven from tales he was told as a child, retold with the discretion a son and grandson might bring to their telling at a time when his mother and grandmother were still alive. There are a few distant relatives with memories like attics stuffed with family lore, and former classmates, in dwindling numbers, with fragmentary memories of coming of age in the Sunflower State during the Great Depression. At the time of the writing of this book, Stanley Ann’s parents were no longer living. Her mother, Madelyn, agreed in September 2008 to be interviewed—on the condition that the interview would occur after the presidential election. Stanley Ann’s father, Stanley, died of prostate cancer in 1992. All of their siblings were alive, however, and spoke in detail about what they remembered. Their help has made it possible to take a stab at the story of the family that produced, on a wintry day in Wichita in November 1942, Stanley Ann.

There is something fresh and quintessentially American about the family tree that extends its branches through and around Stanley Ann’s son, President Obama. Yes, there was the white mother from Kansas and the black father from Kenya. Then there was the Javanese stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, with whom Mr. Obama lived for four years in Jakarta as a small child; there is President Obama’s African-American wife, Michelle, a descendant of slaves. There is his half-Indonesian half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng; her Chinese-Canadian husband, Konrad Ng; and the president’s Kenyan and half-Kenyan half siblings scattered across the globe in places such as Nairobi and Beijing. The family that gathered in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration of the first black president of the United States in January 2009 seemed both uniquely American and at the same time brand-new. In its mixing of races, ethnicities, nationalities, and cultures, it seemed to embody at once the aspirations of the founding fathers to create a place of opportunity for all people, the country’s promise as a beacon for immigrants in an increasingly global culture, and progress in the ongoing struggle to move beyond the United States’ racial history.

Less well known, but classically American in an older sense, is the family tree that spawned Stanley Ann Dunham. Her ancestors were farmers, teachers, abolitionists, Methodist ministers, Baptists, Civil War veterans, veterans of two world wars. They were long-lived people, many of whom lasted into their eighties and early nineties. They were named for patriots and poets: Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, Christopher Columbus Clark and George Washington Clark (brothers of Thomas Jefferson Clark and Francis Marion Clark). Going back several generations, they put their faith in education to an unusual degree. At a time when few Americans were educated beyond high school, both of Stanley Ann’s grandfathers on her paternal side went to college, according to her uncle, Ralph Dunham. For generations, members of both sides of the family have been teachers. There have long been rumors, unproven, of Cherokee blood. According to family lore, a great-great-grandfather of Madelyn Payne Dunham is said to have married an aunt of Wild Bill Hickok. Her grandfather is reputed to have shaken the hand of President Lincoln from his father’s shoulders and seen his brother shot by bushwhackers in southern Missouri a half-dozen years later. Her aunt, Ruth McCurry, a schoolteacher, is said to have taught Mickey Mantle in Commerce, Oklahoma. Ralph Dunham remembered, as a small child, spending the night in the home of William Allen White, the Sage of Emporia, after Dunham’s father, an employee of the El Dorado Garage, delivered to Mr. White his Pierce-Arrow. Charles Payne served in the 89th Infantry Division that liberated Ohrdruf, a sub-camp