Both Presidents Bush can trace their families back to Chorley, in Lancashire, while the story of George Washington – the very first of the First Citizens – began in the village of Warton on the outskirts of Lancaster.
When Obama was elected the 44th president in 2008, his family history was quickly thrust into the spotlight.
Political opponents circulated discredited claims that he had been born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to be president under the terms of the US Constitution that require the commander-in-chief to have been born on American soil.
Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, there was interest in the small but pivotal part that Liverpool played in the Obama origins story.
In the 1840s, Ireland suffered the Great Famine, which saw up to one million people die of starvation or disease in the wake of a potato blight in 1845. In the following decade, an estimated 1.5 million Irish people emigrated to the US.
Among them was Joseph Kearney, a shoemaker who sailed from Liverpool to New York in 1849 to take over his late brother’s farm in the Appalachian Mountains.
The following year his son, Falmouth Kearney, made the same journey from Liverpool.
Fast-forward to 2011, and Falmouth’s great-great-grandson, Obama, went to the village of Monegall in County Ofally, visiting the local pub and trying a pint of Guinness, and making a joke about how he was there “in search of the apostrophe” missing from the ‘O’ in his name.
That transatlantic journey buoyed hopes that Obama would drop in to Liverpool and take up a formal invitation from the city made following his inauguration as president in January 2009.
While he never made it, Steve Rotheram, who was lord mayor of Liverpool at the time and is now the city region’s metro-mayor, told the the city “still extends that welcome”.
