Main article: Early life and career of Barack Obama
Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (now Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children) in
Honolulu, Hawaii, [2][4][5] and is the first Presidentto
have been born in Hawaii. [6] His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in Wichita, Kansas, and was
of mostly English ancestry, [7] along with Scottish,
Irish, German, and Swiss. [8][9][10][11][12] His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian class at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign
student on scholarship. [13][14] The couple married
on February 2, 1961, [15] separated when Obama Sr. went to Harvard University on scholarship, and
divorced in 1964. [13] Obama Sr. remarried and returned to Kenya, visiting Barack in Hawaii only once, in 1971. He died in an automobile accident in
1982. [16]
After her divorce, Dunham married Indonesian Lolo Soetoro, who was attending college in Hawaii. When Suharto, a military leader in Soetoro's home country, came to power in 1967, all Indonesian students studying abroad were recalled, and the family moved to the Menteng neighborhood of
Jakarta. [4][17] From ages six to ten, Obama attended local schools in Jakarta, including Besuki Public
School and St. Francis of Assisi School. [18]
In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Armour Dunham, and with the aid of a scholarship attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from fifth grade until his
graduation from high school in 1979. [19] Obama's mother returned to Hawaii in 1972, remaining there until 1977 when she went back to Indonesia to work as an anthropological field worker. She finally returned to Hawaii in 1994 and lived there for one
year before dying of ovarian cancer
