Vicar, Web site throws light on Obama's Irish heritage
DUBLIN (Reuters) - 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.
"They're in remarkably good condition and we have constant applications from Americans chasing their ancestors."
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 arrived in New York in 1850 before settling in Ohio.
"Like most of us he has an interesting mix of ancestry, including some impressively early all-American roots," said Megan Smolenyak, a spokeswoman for the Web site.
Between 1845 and 1851 over a million people left Ireland on 'famine ships' to escape mass-starvation caused by potato blight and ancestry.co.uk says passenger lists show Obama's great-great-great grandfather Falmuth Kearney was among them.
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.
Born in Hawaii to a white American mother and Kenyan father, Obama's European connection means he can also join more than 30 million of his countrymen in claiming Irish descent.
Among them is former President Bill Clinton who, like President's John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan before him, was not shy of advertising his Irish roots.
Kennedy in particular, as the only Roman Catholic president of the United States, was idolised in mostly Catholic Ireland and Neill said parishioners in Moneygall would be equally fascinated to discover the village's Obama connection.
"We'd certainly welcome a visit. He'd be very, very welcome and speaking personally I'm just glad he's a Democrat."
Should Obama decide to make the trip, he may not be the only presidential pretender in the area, however.
"Martin Sheen is a regular visitor to the nearby parish of Borrisokane," Neill said of the actor who plays fictional President Josiah Bartlet in television drama The West Wing.
