Barack Obama: Through the years

Page last updated at 7:37 GMT, Monday, 2 November 2009

Barack Hussein Obama was born on 4 August 1961 in Hawaii. His father was a goat herder from Kenya but gained a scholarship to study in Hawaii. There he met Barack Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, who lived in Honolulu with her parents.
Barack Obama Sr left his son and wife to continue his studies at Harvard when Obama was a toddler. He later returned to Kenya, worked as an economist and subsequently divorced Ann. He saw his son only once more, in 1971. He died in a car accident in 1982.
When Barack Obama was six, his mother moved to Indonesia with new husband Lolo Soetoro. Obama's half-sister Maya Soetoro Ng was born after the family arrived in Jakarta and a young Barack attended Catholic and secular schools.
When Barack Obama was 10 he moved back to Hawaii and lived with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham. He graduated from Punahou Academy in 1979, spent two years in Los Angeles before attending Columbia University in New York.
In 1983, Barack Obama graduated from Colombia with a degree in political science. In 1985 he moved to Chicago before enrolling at Harvard law school in 1988. He graduated three years later, returning to Chicago to work as a civil rights lawyer.
Barack Obama married Michelle Robinson in 1992 after meeting her while working as an intern at a law firm in Chicago four years before. In the same year he began helping the Democratic Party, setting up voter registration drives for Bill Clinton.
Barack Obama served in the Illinois state senate from 1996 to 2004, before winning a seat in the US Senate and hit the national headlines making a stirring speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He also spoke out against the war in Iraq.
Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination in 2007 and eventually beat Bill Clinton's wife Hillary after a long campaign. On November last year, Obama beat Republican presidential nominee John McCain.
Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th US president on 20 January 2009 in Washington DC becoming the first African-American to ever hold the office. He took over from George W Bush who'd been president for the previous eight years.
After nearly a year in office Barack Obama's honeymoon period is over. He's struggling to push health reform through Congress and is still deciding whether to send more US troops to Afghanistan.