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Irish village celebrates 'O'Bama' link

Posted on: Tuesday, 17 March 2009, 15:00 CDT

A tiny Irish village that once was home to U.S. President Barack Obama's maternal great-great-great-grandfather has embraced the president as one of its own.

Stephen Neill, 39, a Protestant rector of the Church of Ireland in the town on Moneygall, said Obama-mania first came to the town about two years ago when he was contacted by a researcher looking into the then Illinois senator's family tree, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.

Neill said he and the researcher found that ancestors of Obama, the Kearney family, once lived in Moneygall. Fulmouth Kearney left the town at the age of 20 in 1850 and emigrated to the United States, where his great-great-granddaughter Ann Dunham married Barack Hussein Obama Sr. and gave birth to the future president.

Residents have since embraced Obama -- locally known as O'Bama as a pun on his Irish heritage -- by putting his face on ads for local businesses and in one local politician's push to have a statue of the president erected in town.

Henry Healy Jr., 24, said visitors to the town often knock on his door to speak with Obama's nearest relative in the village -- Healy said local records indicate that his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-aunt was Obama's great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother.

So there's a definitive blood link between our family and Barack Obama. It makes me an eighth cousin, he said.

Source: United Press International

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