News 8. 5. 2016
Historic photograph of Obama’s Irish ancestor discovered
That mystery has finally been solved, Fulmoth Kearney’s grave is now properly marked, and we now have faces to go with the names of Kearney and his wife Charlotte.
President Obama’s second cousin once removed Dean Dillard of Chanute, Kansas, recently figured out Kearney’s date of death – March 21, 1878 – and final resting place. With the research help of Norman Peters, Dillard tracked down old cemetery records to Ohio and figured out that Fulmoth was buried in Kansas, in Labette County’s Fairview Cemetery, with his wife, Charlotte.
Dillard and Peters had a headstone erected on the bare burial plot earlier this week. One hundred and thirty six years after his death, Kearney has finally been memorialized. The headstone notes Fulmoth and Charlotte as the “great-great-great-grandparents of President Barack Obama.”
What’s more, Merlyn White’s photo album further coroborates this by listing the same dates of death for Fulmoth and Charlotte.
Smolenyak is thrilled with this fitting bookend to the story of Obama’s Irish ancestor.
„Thanks to the discovery and memorialization of the final resting spot of Fulmoth Kearney, we now how a cradle-to-grave rendition of the life of Barack Obama’s Irish immigrant ancestor,” she told IrishCentral.
“The young fellow who left Moneygall in 1850 emigrated to Ohio where he built a log cabin, married, and had a family before moving on to Indiana and Kansas. He’s well remembered in Ireland, and I’m delighted to see things brought full circle with a headstone for his place of burial in Kansas.“
Between this and the photograph, she added, „I guess Fulmoth decided that it was finally time to give up his secrets!“
Interestingly, she pointed out, Melvina Shields Magruder, one of First Lady Michelle Obama’s third great-grandparents, who died in 1938, was finally commemorated with a headstone in Georgia only three months ago.
„2014 has been a good year for previously overlooked Obama ancestors,“ she wrote.
Sheila Langan (Irish Central)
Václav Bernard
