Free Republic

She is the second Obama relative known to live on skid row. His own brother was found living in a cardboard shanty last month in Kenya, and now his aunt in a Boston slum just five miles from where Obama attended law school. She was found by British journalists in a dismal, run-down public housing project in a violent slum in south Boston. Details. Perhaps surprisingly, Barack Obama has apparently not reached out to help his aunt or his brother, nor does he keep in touch with his relatives. In fact, his charitable contributions for any altruistic purposes are terribly...

Barack Obama's story, spanning from his mother's roots in Kansas to his father's in Kenya and his childhood spent in Hawaii and Indonesia, has been well chronicled and a central part of his allure as a candidate who transcends national and racial lines. But one small part might have remained largely hidden from public view. In a first-floor apartment of a brick public housing complex on a side street in South Boston lives a woman who city officials believe is Obama's aunt. Her name is Zeituni Onyango, as in the "Auntie Zeituni" in one of his books, a polite and...

In his bestselling autobiography Dreams from My Father Mr Obama recalls how, during his first visit to Kenya, his cousin referred to an uncle, Omar, who had left Africa and moved to Boston, but had been “lost”. A little later in the book Mr Obama travels to the family village in western Kenya where he meets his step-grandmother, Sarah, the woman who had raised his father. On the walls of her tin-roofed hut, Mr Obama noticed photographs of the missing Omar, “the uncle who had left for America twenty-five years ago and had never come back”. The woman he calls...