But then, why would Obama Sr., as the biological father, want to give the baby to the Salvation Army if the marriage with Dunham were legitimate?
My theory: Obama Sr. got her pregnant and then grudgingly married her (or agreed to pretend they were married), thinking that the child was his and he would legitimize the child.
Then, he found out she had been having sex with the old man, Frank Marshall Davis.
When he found this out, I bet he told her that the child may well be Frank Marshall Davis' child and that he regretted marrying her and that she should put the child up for adoption. And he told her to go away and not bother him again.
That would be consistent with the character of Obama Sr. as a cad. He found an "out" and he used it.
For her part, she obviously knew exactly which dates she was screwing Davis and which dates Obama Sr. Maybe based on the dates and the time to term she really believed it was Obama's baby and spent years trying to convince him it was his.
She may have even taken the desperate step to travel to Kenya to try to enlist his family to get him to take her back and acknowledge that the baby was his son.
Or, maybe she left in humiliation back to Seattle and ended up having the baby at a home for troubled mothers in Canada, which would explain the necessity for the birth certificate shenanigans.
Obama Sr. did not intend to stay in the U.S., at least certainly not in 1961. He intended to go back to Kenya and be a leader of his country. That is why he did not try to "use" the marriage to get permanent residence, at least not in 1961. (Maybe he began to think differently in 1964 when he was casting about to be allowed to stay longer.)
From the circumstances, one gets the impression that Obama Sr. did not even like Stanley Ann very much. I think they had a one- or two-nighter and from that point on Obama Sr. tried to minimize his entanglement with her and her baby.
bookmark
I talked to a Kenyan man tonight. He said that it is tradition for the son to get the blessing of his father for the woman he is to marry. He agreed that both Stanley Ann and Barack Sr went to Kenya to get that blessing. Kenyans believe that Stanley Ann could get on a flight back to the US until she delivered Baby Barack. The common understanding in Kenya is that Baby Barack was born in the Coast Province General Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya.
I speculate that Stanley Ann and newborn Baby Barack went to Seattle directly from Kenya. The reason for this is that Hussein Onyango Obama did not give his blessing of the marriage. And he told his son not to have any further contact with Stanley Ann. To insure this, he arraigned to have Stanley Ann and Baby Barack fly directly to Seattle, Washington while his son continued his studies in economics at the University of Hawaii.