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JACOB MACKEY DUNHAM

Lucky he didn't inherit his personality

September 9, 2007

Jacob Mackey Dunham was a fairly successful guy in Indiana and the Oklahoma Territory in the late 19th century.

But he sounds like a bit of a grump.

"Jacob Mackey was supposedly not too nice a person, pretty mean to his kids," said his great-grandson, David Lee Dunham. "One of my uncles said he actually never spoke to him. That was one of his grandsons. He would just pass and never speak."

Obama's great-great-great grandfather, Jacob Mackey Dunham was a farmer in Tipton County, Ind., in the 1870s. He later owned restaurants and a confectionary in the Oklahoma Territory, where he died in 1907, according to research by David Lee Dunham.

Jacob Mackey Dunham's son Jacob W. Dunham -- that would be Obama's great-great grandfather -- wound up being a pharmacist in Wichita, Kansas. Another of Jacob Mackey Dunham's sons ran a prosperous grocery store in Oklahoma in the early 1900s that shipped pecans and furs as far as St. Louis.

David Lee Dunham, 69, a retired postal worker from Owasso, Okla., who has been doing genealogy for 40 years, can see the Dunham side of the family in Obama's face.

"I can see Barack's resemblance, kind of like the thin face, not too wide, fairly nice looking -- a lot of Dunhams have that," he said.