Vicar's search throws light on Obama's Irish heritage
DUBLIN -- Documents unearthed by an Irish vicar show ancestors of Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama may have arrived in the United States from a tiny village in central Ireland as early as the 1790s.
"They're old parish records going back to 1799," Canon Stephen Neill, rector for the parish of Moneygall, told Reuters...
Genealogy Web site www.ancestry.co.uk asked Neill, whose father is Anglican archbishop of Dublin, to check parish records after discovering documents indicating Obama's great-great-great grandfather [Falmuth Kearney] arrived in New York in 1850 before settling in Ohio...
Subsequent research into the parish records provided by Neill revealed not only that the Kearneys hailed from Moneygall in County Offaly but also that other family members may have crossed the Atlantic before him in the 1790s, the Web site said.
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"They're old parish records going back to 1799," Canon Stephen Neill, rector for the parish of Moneygall, told Reuters...
Genealogy Web site www.ancestry.co.uk asked Neill, whose father is Anglican archbishop of Dublin, to check parish records after discovering documents indicating Obama's great-great-great grandfather [Falmuth Kearney] arrived in New York in 1850 before settling in Ohio...
Subsequent research into the parish records provided by Neill revealed not only that the Kearneys hailed from Moneygall in County Offaly but also that other family members may have crossed the Atlantic before him in the 1790s, the Web site said.