Pioneers

Steve MacDonogh

Tells the story of the Irish ancestry of Barack Obama's mother, Ann Dunham. "Her great-great grandfather who immigrated from the small village of Moneygall in Ireland to the Scioto Valley in Ohio, and of his relatives who made the journey before him. This Irish family, the Kearneys, came first to Baltimore, Maryland, then moved west with the frontier to Ohio... [and] further, to Indiana ... before many of the Dunhams and Kearneys moved on to Kansas, some to Oklahoma ... [This is] a poignant evocation of Ireland's darkest years, America's pioneering past and ow the two are intertwined in a dramatic narrative encapsulating the American Dream ... This is also the story of the eighteenth century Irish Protestant immigrants."