Madelyn and Stanley Dunham

Madelyn Payne Dunham (born October 1922) is the maternal grandmother and only living full-blood relative of United States Senator and Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama. She raised Senator Obama in her Honolulu, Hawaii high-rise apartment from age 10, where she still lives today.

Biography

Madelyn Payne was born in Augusta, Kansas. She married Barack Obama's grandfather, furniture salesman Stanley Armour Dunham from El Dorado, Kansas, on May 4, 1940.. During World War II, while Stanley Dunham served in the Army, Madelyn worked on a Boeing aircraft assembly line. She gave birth to Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (who went by the name of Ann Dunham, despite being named "Stanley" after her father who wanted a boy), in Fort Leavenworth.. The family lived in California, Kansas, Texas, and Washington before settling in Hawaii, where Ann went to the University of Hawaii and met Senator Obama's father, Barack Hussein Obama Senior from Kenya. Both Dunhams were were upset when their daughter Ann married Barack Obama Senior, but they adapted. Madelyn Dunham was quoted as saying, “I am a little dubious of the things that people from foreign countries tell me.".

When Barack was 10 and his mother Ann was employed on development projects in Indonesia and around the world helping women obtain microfinance, he decided to stay in Hawaii with his grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham. Obama writes in his book, "I’d arrived at an unspoken pact with my grandparents: I could live with them and they’d leave me alone so long as I kept my trouble out of sight.”. In his memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama described his grandmother as "suspicious of overwrought sentiments or overblown claims, content with common sense." He also called her "a trailblazer of sorts, the first woman vice-president of a local bank." Madelyn Dunham took care of Barack's mother Ann in Hawaii in her last months before Ann died of cancer at age 53..

Today a widow, Obama's grandmother currently lives in what CBS News has described as a "non-descript highrise" in Honolulu, Hawaii in the same apartment in which Barack Obama grew up (and with the same telephone number as when Obama lived there as "Barry").. Although Barack Obama's paternal step-grandmother Sarah Obama has given a number of recent interviews, Madelyn Dunham's last interview was in 2004, on the occasion of Barack Obama's keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. "I am not giving any interviews," Madelyn Dunham told a reporter who phoned in March 2008. "I am in poor health."