Obama was born on August 4, 1961,
[1] at Kapiʻolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (now
Kapiʻolani Medical Center for Women and Children) in
Honolulu, Hawaii,
[2][3][4] and would become the first President to have been born in Hawaii.
[5] His mother,
Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in
Wichita, Kansas, and was of mostly English ancestry.
[6] His father,
Barack Obama, Sr., was a
Luo from
Nyang’oma Kogelo, Kenya. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian class at the
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship.
[7][8] The couple married in
Wailuku on
Maui on February 2, 1961,
[9][10] and separated when, in late August 1961, Obama's mother moved with their newborn son to attend the
University of Washington in Seattle for one year. In the meantime, Obama, Sr. completed his undergraduate economics degree in Hawaii in June 1962, then left to attend graduate school at
Harvard University on a scholarship. Obama's parents divorced in March 1964.
[11] Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964 where he remarried; he visited Barack in Hawaii only once, in 1971.
[12] He died in an automobile accident in 1982 when his son was 21 years old.
[13]
In 1963, Dunham met
Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian
East–West Center graduate student in geography at the University of Hawaii, and the couple were married on
Molokai on March 15, 1965.
[14] After two one-year extensions of his
J-1 visa, Lolo returned to
Indonesia in 1966, followed sixteen months later by his wife and stepson in 1967, with the family initially living in a Menteng Dalam neighborhood in the
Tebet subdistrict of south
Jakarta, then from 1970 in a wealthier neighborhood in the
Menteng subdistrict of central Jakarta.
[15] From ages six to ten, Obama attended local Indonesian-language schools: St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School for two years and Besuki Public School for one and a half years, supplemented by English-language Calvert School homeschooling by his mother.[16]
Obama returned to Honolulu in 1971 to live with his maternal grandparents,
Madelyn and
Stanley Dunham, and with the aid of a scholarship
attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979.[17] Obama lived with his mother and sister in Hawaii for three years from 1972 to 1975 while his mother was a graduate student in
anthropology at the University of Hawaii.
[18] Obama chose to stay in Hawaii with his grandparents for high school at Punahou when his mother and sister returned to Indonesia in 1975 so his mother could begin anthropology field work.
[19] His mother spent most of the next two decades in Indonesia, divorcing Lolo in 1980 and earning a PhD in 1992, before dying in 1995 in Hawaii following treatment for
ovarian cancer and
uterine cancer.
[20]