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There is an official HI record of an Obama Dunham marriage. It may have been entered into the Hawaii Vital Statistic records YEARS LATER (even as a hand-written annotation) as a DIRECT result of the 1964 Divorce Documentation itself, which may have been initiated in January 1964 WITHOUT Ann Dunham actually showing a Marriage Certificate to the presiding Divorce judge, Judge King.

I do not believe they were married in Hawaii--I doubt there is any real record there--you don't set out copies of the record--publication of her U of W grade transcript may not be what you intended. But I don't have any trouble believing that they massaged the records of marriage at some later date.

I don't agree with Fred's proposition that she needed the decree for custody purposes. She had custody; even today, the mother with custody wouldn't need to come up with the decree to manage the kid's relationship with the school.

The obvious reason she wanted the divorce was that she wanted to marry someone else and did not want to commit bigamy to do so. And that is an equally plausible excuse for why Barack Sr. wouldn't marry her in Honolulu.

So if we want to look for evidence of the marriage, we need to look for a jurisdiction where more than one wife is the accepted norm.

The fact that they were going half way around the world to do it was part of the reason they waited until the semester break at the end of Fall semester the end of January to do it. There might have been other reasons they waited until February but this one fits.

I view it as a given that Obama was in fact born in Mombasa. There is way too much evidence to have much doubt about that question.

So ask yourself how she got there and when or why did she go there? If you believe the story about the missionaries seeing her denied boarding in Nairobi in July (and I do), she obviously intended to deliver in the US--why was she in Kenya in July?

Why can't they come up with any evidence that she was pregnant and in Hawaii during the spring and summer of 1961? Why can't they come up with any shred of evidence as to where she was in the period between the end of fall semester in 1960-61 and her appearance on Mercer Island?

As to his actual parentage, there is third hand testimony somewhere about a friend of Stanley Armor (her father) about the "guess who's coming to dinner" conversation that, combined with the birth in Kenya, in my mind pretty well locks in Obama Sr.

Seems to me a logical place to look for evidence of a marriage is Kenya, or maybe Ghana. It wouldn't be surprising if you didn't find a paper record--that wouldn't be unusual in that area and under the circumstances. You have to speculate what would have been on the mind of Obama's manager on this issue: Find the marriage certificate in Kenya and maybe people will ask when and how she came back and open a more detailed inquiry where she was in Hawaii between the marriage and birth? The decision to conceal the marriage location was made a long time ago--presumably as early as the date on which she filed the divorce proceeding, probably before there was sophisticated legal help managing the facts.

If you accept as a working hypothesis that they were in fact married in some kind of form proceeding, if they had done it in Hawaii or in any other Western jurisdiction, there isn't any reason to conceal the location where the act took place. It was bigamy. So what--it would have passed as a de facto marriage while Stanley Ann was alive; when both are dead, who would care?

So maybe an after the fact deliberation by his managers that caused them to lock that fact into the legend is the desire to avoid making Stanley Ann guilty of perjury. They had a marriage in Hawaii under oath from the mother, that is going to be difficult to contradict under circumstances where there are probably some reasons you don't want to get too close to the real marriage location.