CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS CLARK
'Representative of America'
Christopher Columbus Clark was Barack Obama's great-great-great grandfather, not his great-great grandfather, as Obama wrote in his book Dreams From My Father.
But Obama was right about Clark fighting in the Civil War. Listed as Columbus Clark, he served 51 days as a private in the the 69th Regiment of the Enrolled Missouri Militia, under Capt. Thacker, in the fall of 1864, according to Missouri state records.
Obama also wrote that Clark's "wife's mother was rumoured to have been a second cousin of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy." But genealogist William Addams Reitwiesner has written that it was actually Clark's mother, Elizabeth Davis -- not his mother-in-law -- who was related to Jefferson Davis.
Clark's in-laws did own slaves -- a revelation that caused a minor flap when the Baltimore Sun revealed that part of Reitwiesner's research earlier this year. Clark's father-in-law, George Washington Overall, and Overall's mother-in-law, Mary Grable Duvall, each owned three slaves in Nelson Co., Ky., when the 1850 Census was taken.
Obama's campaign spokesman has said the U.S. senator's ancestors "are representive of America."
As for Clark, he spent much of his life farming in Missouri and Kansas. In 1930, he was an 84-year-old widower, living in retirement with his daughter Gabriella Armour and her family in El Dorado, Kansas. Harry and Gabriella Armour's family included two of their grandchildren -- Ralph, 13, and Stanley Dunham, 12.
Three decades later, Stanley Dunham would become a grandfather in Hawaii, when his daughter Stanley Ann Dunham gave birth to Barack Obama.