From a post at S&L by CurvyRed:
I am having a great deal of difficulty with verfication of this Charles T. Payne, because according to genealogy website his mother had one brother Charles W. Payne.
Rolla Charles PAYNE and Leona MCCURRY married in Kansas about 1922 and had the following children:
i. Madelyn PAYNE
ii. Charles W. PAYNE born about 1924.
iii. Arlene PAYNE born about 1926
Now there is a Jon Payne who claims to be Charles T. Payne’s brother:
http://cnnwire.blogs.cnn.com/2.....e-mistake/
I really hope someone can verify if the great uncle is Charles W. or Charles T. and who the heck is Jon?
Jon Payne, Obama’s maternal great uncle, told CNN that his older brother Charles returned from the war with photographs of concentration camps but did not want to talk about his experiences. Payne, 71, said he was unsure if his brother — who is 83 and still living in Chicago — took the photographs himself.
http://cnnwire.blogs.cnn.com/2008/05/27/obama-campaign-acknowledges-concentration-camp-name-mistake/
It looks like they’re still scrubbing the websites.
It’s possible that the genealogy site linked by Dan Riehl has the middle initial wrong. If you assume that the middle initial wasn’t “W,” there actually were five Charles Paynes in the army from Kansas: a Charles A, a Charles E, a Charles J, and two Charles Ls (the second one is a Charlie rather than Charles). So it’s possible that it’s one of them. The problem remains, though, that we don’t have any record of a Charles Payne in the 89th, and the only potential candidate (C. T. Payne) doesn’t have any of those middle initials.
http://www.transterrestrial.com/archives/2008/05/maybe_he_sailed.html