Throughout her nearly 53 years of life, Ann Dunham, the mother of Barack Obama, was publicly recognized by four distinct names. Despite these variations, she was consistently acknowledged as the most influence in her son’s life, a sentiment he articulated in an Instagram post dedicated to her in August 2022.
Born Stanley Ann Dunham on November 29, 1942, in Wichita, Kansas, she received her masculine name from her father, who had initially hoped for a son. According to her biography, “A Singular Woman,” her mother suggested that the name might have been inspired by a character played by Bette Davis in the film “In This Our Life.”
Despite Obama Sr.’s false claim that he was divorced from his wife in Kenya, the couple’s marriage lasted only three years before they separated in 1964
During her childhood, Dunham used her full name but eventually began to identify more with her middle name, Ann, starting in college and continuing throughout her adult life.
In addition to her shift in first names, Dunham also changed her last name three times during her life. She adopted new surnames following two marriages from the early 1960s to the early 1980s. Her biography notes that she met her first husband, Barack Obama Sr., in 1960 while both were college students in Hawaii.
They married in 1961 when Dunham was three months pregnant, although Obama Sr. was still legally married to another woman in Kenya, despite falsely claiming he was divorced. While she continued using her middle name, Ann, she adopted her husband’s last name, becoming Ann Obama. The couple divorced in 1964.
Dunham later married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian surveyor who became a consultant for Mobil, in 1966. This second marriage led to yet another name change, and she became Ann Soetoro.
After their wedding, Dunham and her son moved to Indonesia with Soetoro in 1967, where Obama Jr. spent part of his childhood until he returned to Hawaii in 1971 to live with his grandparents.
Following her divorce from Soetoro in 1980, Dunham began using various names, including a different spelling of her former husband’s last name, Sutoro. She was known as Ann Sutoro, Ann Dunham Sutoro, and S. Ann Dunham Sutoro.
Until her passing in November 1995 due to uterine cancer, she reverted to her maiden name, occasionally referring to herself as Ann Dunham, S. Ann Dunham, and (Stanley) Ann Dunham.
