• On the 24th of August 1955, Michael Dale 'Mike' Huckabee
was born to Dorsey Wiles Huckabee and May Elder in the town of
Hope, Arkansas, the same place where Bill Clinton was born nine
years later.

• Huckabee's father held two jobs, as a fire-fighter and
car mechanic while his mother worked as a clerk in a local gas
company to support the four-member family.

• Huckabee once said about his dad, "he was one of those
guys who lifted things, who worked with his hands, and got his
hands real dirty. I think he had grime and grease all over them
as long as he lived." 

• Remembering and oft quoting the tiny rental house the
family lived in, Huckabee says, "I am a generation away from
abject poverty and I know it."

• Huckabee's mother, May Elder, was the oldest of seven
children who had no other option but to quit school and take care
of her younger siblings while her parents toiled hard, day and
night.

• Being born to a blue-collar family, Huckabee was the
first male in his entire family lineage to have graduated from
high school. He often says, "My father had never finished high
school, nor his father, nor his."

• On setting a new standard in his family, Huckabee's
father is said to have chuckled, "Son, don't look too far up the
family tree. There are some things there that might embarrass
you."

• Though Huckabee lacked in pedigree, his humble Southern
roots and pastoral credentials gave him a better understanding of
the problems of the working class in America.
		

• On the 4th of August 1961, Barack Hussein Obama was born
in Honolulu, Hawaii to a Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr.
and an American mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.

• Obama highlights thus, the diversity of his family tree:
"It's like a little mini-United Nations. I've got relatives who
look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like
Margaret Thatcher".

• Obama's parents met in 1960 at the University of Hawaii
and married in 1961 but soon divorced. Obama's father moved to
Connecticut before returning to Kenya, where he remarried and had
two more sons, David Ndesandjo and Mark Ndesandjo. Obama's mother
remarried an Indonesian, Lolo Soetoro and the family moved to
Indonesia along with Obama and his half-sister Maya Soetoro.

• In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his
maternal grandparents, Stanley Armour Dunham and Madelyn, one of
the first female Vice-Presidents of the Bank of Hawaii. 

• Obama's maternal heritage consists mostly of English
ancestry, with traces of German, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Swiss
and French ancestry. His maternal grandfather is related to James
Madison, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, George H. W.
Bush and George W. Bush, who were all U.S presidents.

• Obama's paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama was
a Christian mission cook and herbalist who later embraced Islam.
Being an avid traveler, he had visited Europe, India and Zanzibar
while he was recruited to fight for colonial power England during
World War I.

• On his paternal side, Obama's lineage can be traced back
to the early descendants of the Luo tribal king.


• According 1850 Census records from Kentucky, Barack
Obama's great-great-great-great grandfather, George Washington
Overall, owned two slaves, a 15 year-old girl and a 25-year-old
man. The same records show that one of Obama's
great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also
owned two black slaves, a 60 year-old man and a 58 year-old
woman.