ROLLA C. PAYNE AND LEONA MCCURRY PAYNE

'Get as far away from the farm'

Barack Obama's great-grandparents grew up on the farms of Kansas, but the turn-of-the century oil boom there and in Oklahoma and surrounding states provided jobs for them and many of their relatives.

"They were raised on farms, but they did not farm after they grew up and had families," said their niece, Rae Janette McCurry Marshall, 77, of El Reno, Okla. "I think they wanted to get as far away from the farm as they could.

"Most of them were hard-working every day people," Marshall said. "After my dad and his brothers and sisters got off the farm, they never went back. Most of them worked for the oil company."

From at least 1917 to 1930, Rolla Payne worked as a bookkeeper for oil companies or their offshoots in Oklahoma and, later, Kansas, according to military and Census records. At least two of Leona's brothers spent time as drillers in Kansas oilfields.

In Dreams From My Father, Obama wrote that Rolla Payne managed an oil lease for Standard Oil, giving him a steady job during the Depression and a "respectable" life.

"The family kept their house spotless and ordered Great Books through the mail," Obama wrote.

Marshall said her Uncle Payne and Aunt Lee lived a comfortable, but far from affluent, life.

"They lived in Kansas. It was a little suburb of Wichita. They were not poor. They lived in kind of an average house, just like anyone else in the '30s. None of our family was wealthy, but we survived."