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Mother: Stanley "Ann" Dunham
Born in Kansas, Barack Obama's mother always told friends she was named Stanley because her dad wanted a boy. As a child, her family moved frequently—before she was 18, the Dunhams moved more than five times, living in states including California, Texas, and Washington. At the age of 18, she enrolled in the University of Hawaii to study anthropology. It was there that she meet and married a young, charismatic Kenyan named Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. In his book Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama states that both sets of grandparents opposed the marriage, with his paternal grandfather stating that he didn't want the "Obama blood sullied by a white woman." The marriage took place in February 1961, when Ann was three months pregnant with Barack, who was born in August.

The marriage lasted only three years, dissolving after Obama, Sr., left to pursue graduate studies at Harvard. After they divorced, Dunham worked to make ends meet, relying on food stamps and her parents to keep her family together. In 1967, she married an Indonesian man named Lolo Soetoro and moved the family to Indonesia, where she gave birth to a daughter, Maya. While there, Dunham would wake a young Obama up as early as 4 a.m. to give him extra lessons, scared he wasn't being challenged enough at school, and made him read books about the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr., and listen to recordings by Mahalia Jackson to keep him connected to his black roots.

When Obama was 10, Dunham allowed him to move back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents and attend Punahou, an elite prep school. She joined him a year later, in 1972. She and Soetoro did not live together again, but did not divorce until 1980.

Dunham pursued a Ph.D. and did her fieldwork back in Indonesia, leaving Obama and his sister with her parents. She died in 1995 from ovarian cancer, but is largely credited with helping build the microfinance program in Indonesia through her anthropological research on how people worked. Obama has often spoken about what a tremendous influence she was on his life.

Father: Barack Hussein Obama, Sr.
In September 1959, 23-year-old Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., was one of 81 young Kenyans sent to America as part of a scholarship program to give Kenyans an American university education with which they could return to their country and assume key roles in a nation just assuming its independence. The elder Obama, from Alego, in Siaya District, Nyanza Provence, was reportedly charming, with a deep voice and a charismatic personality. His childhood was spent herding goats and attending school in a tin-roof shack.

Obama, Sr., left his wife and young son to attend graduate school at Harvard and study economics. Following that, he returned to Kenya and worked for the Ministry of Planning. Barack saw his father only once more during his lifetime, in 1971, when the elder Obama visited Hawaii. Obama, Sr., went on to have a number of children with at least four additional wives. He was killed in a car accident in 1982.

Stepfather: Lolo Soetoro
Reportedly full of good manners and grace, Lolo Soetoro married Ann Dunham in 1967 after they met at the University of Hawaii. An Indonesian oil manager, he moved his new wife and stepson to his native country, where he and Dunham gradually began growing apart as he became more interested in Western culture and she in Indonesian. Obama credits Soetoro with sharing an exotic side of life with him, including ideas such as men absorbing the power of the animals they ate, like dog or snake. Soetero subscribed to a form of Islam that, Obama explained, made "room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths." Lolo Soetoro stayed in Indonesia after he and Ann divorced, and died in 1987 from a liver ailment.