Barack Obama's Irish roots are better-documented than JD Vance's. Obama's Irish ancestry can be traced back to Moneygall, a village in County Offaly, Ireland, where his third great-grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, lived before emigrating to the United States on one of the dreaded "coffin ships".
There’s no one more Irish than Barack O’Bama
He's even got a catchy song...
If only he had been O’Bama
Heck, Obama's ancestry from the first Czech royal family are better documented... :D
Thank you for posting this article! I was trying to remember where I had read about Obama's love-in when he visited Moneygall, but I just couldn't find it.
This is the first I've heard of JD Vance's claims of Irish ancestry. Trying to make this into a scandal just reeks of desperation.
It's not a scandal. It's a time to gather together and laugh at JD Vance.
That was a really enjoyable day. Obama's visit was live on Irish TV for most of the day. It was just after the 2008 financial crash, our economy was falling apart. He gave a truly rousing and hope-fillled speech in Dublin. Available on YouTube. Thanks Barrack.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=DerV...
What’s with that picture? I don’t recall Obama ever wearing makeup to darken his skin, much less applying it so sloppily.
It's absolutely hilarious that Barack O'Bama is more Irish than JD Vance ☘️
The eyes are truly smiling
Genealogy reports Vance more closely related to Sephora than Ireland.
Malarkeyhontas
Hahahaha. When we were in Dublin last week, our guide made sure to mention Obama’s Irish heritage. No one mentioned Vance.
You should have visited the Obama services Plaza. (Google it).
Bet that chafes, hey Mr Vance?
JD is related to Heter O’Sectional
I love this for Vance!
Erin go bragh
JD Vance is definitely one being and not several and has every organ duplicated as is normal in humans
😂😂😂
although now I'm picturing Vance as a vampire thrall clapping along bloodily to "Rocky Road to Dublin" and it's entirely too easy
Undeniable Ireland W
Who refers to someone else's grandparents like that? That's about as folksy as a Cracker Barrel, how could everyone miss that?
Who wrote that horseshit.
Wait they named her after a bourbon?
Don't go digging TOO deeply into JD's family history and which ... fraternal organizations ... his ancestors might have taken part in starting around 1915
OTOH I can imagine the Ulstermen burying a genealogical connection to a historical Orange hero once they found out JD was a converted catholic.
so obviously made up. You know he wrote in that book that, as a kid, he once punched another kid so hard in the stomach that he "vomited blood", which is only something someone who's only experience of fights is from anime would claim.
🤮
All day
JD Farce
Fuckin perfect
Well, now I see why so many people bought into the couch story
He definitely fucked(s) couches
As the great Lore predicted.
That’s probably not all he fucked. 🐷
most of his impoverished suffering seems to have revolved around a summer at MeeMaw's where he was embarrassed about not having the designer labels & worked as a grocery store clerk ...where of course he Judged people with food stamps
Arrogant phony jerk.
And yet, she forgot to teach him how to appear normal while ordering donuts.
You'd think a real Man of the People like JD would be well-acquainted with the humble donut. Maybe they should have sent him to a croissant store instead.
JD: [staring at himself in the mirror] C'mon, Big JD. Get out there and give'm the razzle dazzle. Just got a tap into that classic JD charisma.
this makes my depiction of vance as a steven universe fan make more sense than vance's own attempts to establish identity
JD Vance eats SOUP. 🤣
With a plastic fork.
No, with a straw. It gives him pouty lips.
Yes, which according to expert Jesse Waters means he is a girl!
"why my soup go through fork?"
"... and then I shagged Richard Gere on a grand piano"
"But we never kissed on the mouth"
Walz was right. This guy is so fucking WEIRD.
he's absolutely seething with rage and contempt and has no idea who he actually is. it's what makes him dangerous and also so offputting, specifically the contempt. you can spot it a mile away. and unlike Trump he's uncomfortable in his own skin and moves/talks like it.
Nah, I disagree. He's that weird guy at college/the pub/a convention that gloms onto your group and when you say "OK, we're going to get food..." he says: "Awesome, where are we going?" and you're like NOT YOU. 🙄 Except most people grow out of that. He's become EVEN WEIRDER.
This rings true but I submit that the rage and contempt are palpable which is often why no one wants to go with That Guy, not because he doesn't use the right fork he's a married incel
You're both right. The try-hard guy grows up into the kind of seething contempt Vance shows, and it's worse because he's still that hanger-on with a huge platform for the contempt. Taking out every rejection on the world.
it also explains how in college he at least *seemed* to demonstrate more signs of being a human being. Also gotta say that he reminds me a *lot* of this guy I knew in grad school. Deeply closeted, eventually married (female) childhood sweetheart. Who he did not like.
To be clear, I'm not calling him weird for learning the correct utensils. Many of us use information from movies and TV shows to help us navigate parts of the world we're unfamiliar with. I assume he's referencing Titanic or Pretty Woman here (or Mighty Ducks 3. Actually, that's probably it).
Because many of us would tell the story of how we overcame an awkward etiquette fiasco because we had watched a film as a silly aside with friends. But Vance tells this story with all the seriousness you would reserve for an epiphany of moral or material matters and expects us to be wowed by it.
It's not like he was inspired by something someone at the table said, called his girlfriend (who is totally real, of course and not Google) for an additional piece of information and solved the Hodge Conjecture. It's just cutlery. And THAT'S why he's weird.
That and the couch thing.
That comment was the only thing that I remember about his book. He is almost as damaged as his Boss.
"and then the boat hit an iceberg."
Or, then he fucked Richard Gere…
Vance is a phony poor person. My cousins and I could easily decipher that setting because we spent our teen years in restaurants setting those utensils on tables. We were happy to have the work.
From this day forward, I’m going to refer to Vance as The Dazzler 🍴 🍽️ 🥄
(not so)-fun for me, is that JD is my wife's 2nd cousin once removed, via the dad that ditched his mom. Oh shit, she might have to question her assumed Irish heritage now.
It has already happened, and I’m eager for the report!
Let’s
Let me guess!
I hadn't known that he only changed to "Vance" in the context of "Hillbilly Elegy" -- which he wrote at the insistence of "Tiger Mom" Amy Chua, his Yale Law mentor. Clearly, taking the name "Vance" was a strategic move to legitimate the premise of his book, and it had a better ring than Bowman.
This mystifies me. What's wrong with Bowman, that's fixed by Vance?
It lands differently on the ear; "J. D. Vance" is more memorable than "James Bowman." I'm not saying that I, personally, find it "better," but public figures often change their names for reasons of perceived catchiness, and I expect he took those factors into account.
I guess I have a tin ear on this one. For one thing the only association I have with Vance is Vivian Vance, from I Love Lucy - so Ethel Mertz. And JD just sounds like a twangy boyish nickname - like Buster. So yeah, to me, JD Vance sound like Ethel Mertz's kid who wanted to be a cowboy.
Oh hell. lol. Can you imagine Ethel’s nephew Buster Mertz’s pranks on Ethel and Lucy when he comes to visit? Ricky demands Fred do something about his nephew which accomplishes nothing and Ethel and Lucy eventually connive to put the kid on a bus back to his parents.
Also, as another poster pointed out, "Bowman" is an English name, ancestrally. If he wanted to claim Scots-Irish ancestry, "Vance" is traditionally Scots-Irish.
The name is more common in America than Britain. It's probably German (anglicisation of extremely common Baumann) at least half the time.
Yes, no doubt a lot of the time it's an Anglicization of Baumann.
The English version would more likely be Archer
Could also be Bowman or Fletcher
English?
So his name doesn't match his birth certificate? According to the SAVE Act Republicans are using to disenfranchise women, can he vote legally?
Not unless he has his MULTIPLE name change documents with him.
The Talented Mr. Vance.
Without the charisma
Pretty sure "Hillbilly royalty" is NOT a thing
of course the VP to the biggest conman POTUS has a totally fake story behind his fake name
As soon as I read an excerpt of his book about the Yale dinner where he was confused about multiple forks and red/white wines I knew he was a liar. Like come on, you’ve never seen TV? A movie? Am I supposed to believe you were just huddling on a dirt floor eating spaghetti-o’s with your fingers?
Especially when he'd directed his ambitions to getting himself into Yale Law. You don't show up there without having figured out how to fit in with fancy people. It would be one thing if that story was about undergrad, maybe, but not law school.
Right? He’d never heard of simply watching what other people do then do that? His entire story beggars belief
Yes. Social climbers know to observe everything around them (and/or to learn from movies and books) in order to get where they want to go, and he is a textbook social climber.
The Untalented Mr. James Donald Bowman/James David Hamel/J.D. Vance/JD Vance
(You read my mind; I was totally thinking Ripley)
Our household always had a copy of Emily Post on the shelf, and you’d better believe my parents gave me my own copy (plus a Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook) when I got married. Fancy dinners? Special forks? Never. But I was prepared just in case! These things were at bookstores in the 90s.
And he's exactly the intended audience for Emily Post. Etiquette books were not intended for the upper classes, who will eat tuna on icecream with the marmalade spoon and merely be though eccentric. They're for the aspirational middle class, who think they want to become Sir Tuna and Lady Icecream.
I also want to clear an ambiguity that may be hurtful in my original post: I fucking love Spaghetti-O’s. Spaghetti-O’s are amazing
Every time I think about his Hillbilly Elegy “memoir” I get so mad that the movie adaptation sucked so hard. If it had swept the Oscars we wouldn’t have to be dealing with that pissant right now, he’d be an atheist executive producer in Hollywood
I mean, I was a senior in college and didn't know how sit-down restaurants worked, having only gone to one once when a rich uncle visited. I still don't know the function of different forks and have had wine like twice. Vance is a fake, but this is a weird thing to object to as fake.
I’d only gone to Denny’s and Ponderosa before college but I watched the Love Boat as a kid and knew there was such a thing as rich people having fancy multiple courses. Also situational awareness is a thing yeah? Just do what the other (fancy) people are doing, this applies to many contexts
They didn't finish the excerpt from that story which...oh, is it there, or, there's a truly ludicrous bit where he gags on the fancy food or drink--goddammit now I have to go try to look it up anyway the whole thing is giving James Frey to some degree
Immediately thought of James Frey. I used to travel for work when that “memoir” came out. The opening of him waking up on a plane covered in blood and vomit because he got the shit kicked out of him earlier made me say no you fucking didn’t they would never let you board that plane
This is the most brutal review ever and I still love it hard exiledonline.com/a-million-pi...
That was glorious
oh I forgot! He reviewed the follow up and it's WORSE exiledonline.com/frey%E2%80%9...
Omg both of these reviews are masterpieces
“I start crying again. Softly crying. I think of Lilly and I cry. It’s all I can do. Cry.” I found myself laughing every time I read this, imagining Daffy Duck doing the scene: “It’th all I can do!” then turning to the audience to clarify things: “Cry, that ith.”
"It’s a fitting literary metonymy for the Bush era: the rich have decided to steal it all, even the tears of the losers."
You just use the silverware from out to in as each course arrives. It isn't your job as the diner to know. It's the job of the person who sets the table to get it right. If one was taught this, it was because one was being raised to be a homemaker or to otherwise live without staff.
or to run the estate. hi, hello, where is my dang staff already?!
I mean 😂 I didn't know this until I was in my 20's either, but I didn't write a fucking book about it where I featured as Oliver Twist Then again I didn't go to Yale and don't even have a college degree
It reveals that one was raised as a member of the middling classes to have an overly in-depth knowledge of and adherence to table etiquette.
That is all 100% bullshit.
JD Vance is fiction at its best
O'Bama tho PLEASE 😭😭😂
Wait. Now he is claiming his family personally started the Hatfield feud?!? This dude is now trying to Forest Gump himself into history isn’t he? Let me guess, he also claims direct relations to the Lincoln assasination?
My readings into that feud indicate it started with conflicting Civil War loyalties, and that the story of an infamous murder was the invention of some 19th Century writer trying to sell more magazines.
Which makes Vance trying to grab onto it with a fake relative story even more interesting. He didn’t even bother to research the event before pretending it’s his family.
Nah that'd be silly. Eating the Lindbergh baby though, yeah that'd be believable he'd do that
His Greta-great-grandfather taught Robert E Lee how to be a military general. His n^X grandfather was a personal spy for George Washington and was the one who actually did the Paul Revere ride.
I'm sorry I read that as Paul Revere rode JD Vance's ancestor which gives "THE BRITISH ARE COMING" a whole new dimension
I legitimately just spit out the iced tea I’m drinking!
:D
lol. Ok that is hilarious and this is now the way I want my comment to be interpreted.
So, his birth certificate won't match his current ID.
I just asked same question.
So claiming your forebears started a stupid murderous feud is a point of pride?
He’s trying to Forrest Gump his way into history
Things that remind you of Appalachia: 1) J D Vance 2) The Dover Oak Tree in the blue ridge valley 3) WWE legend Cody Rhodes (from North Carolina) 4) The John Denver song "Country Roads" Realising 1,2 & 3 also spell out 4 🤣
Me too and I’m not ☘️ Irish!
As a legit Irish-American, all I can say is thank you, Jaysus. ☘️
Can we start caling him O'Cahontas?
Poor JD will end up on the analyst’s couch because of this. On second thought, maybe he should be kept away from the couch.
Exactly! Is it petty that I love when their lies fold in on them?
'Ulster says no'. One for the kids there.
Shit, my Abuelita was more Irish than Vance. Her Abuelo Tomas was always a mystery, he wasn't Mexican but took his surrogate dad Lorenzo Trevino's name and married a Mexican, we always thought he was German but DNA showed him to be Thomas Ryan whose roots go back to Pennsylvania then Ireland! 😅
O’Bama lol
Aaaand cue the black Irish jokes. Thank you everybody. I'll see myself out now. 😁
So, what group of cat- or dog-eaters *did* spawn this couch fucker?
The Irish big mad at Joe Biden tho.
That must have been a real process to find that information. The only real records we could find of my dads side of the family past his parents was a name, rank, and serial number. British war records are well kept. Peter Neary, Pvt. Died in the first battle of the somme. Thats... all we have.
If you're interested in further research and have some information about where and when he was born parish record keeping is generally good here. Both Catholic and Protestant. A baptismal cert can lead to a lot of information
You'd have to travel to the parishes for that though. The 1905 census of Ireland is online and searchable and as it's pretty 1921 includes what is now northern Ireland
Thats really rad to know thank you! Something ill have to do when i visit some day.
Best of luck in your research.
Thank you! Ill be looking into the 1905 census too.
I'm so Irish, i had a great great grandfather be singularly responsible for a train wreck.
Oh so he’s JD Vance’s ancestor?
I mean ... i cant argue with that joke. Came in solid there.
I had a Kearney grandmother from Offaly. Must look that up. I hope there is some reward for being related.🍀
This is a thing we need to spend time on?
O'Leary, O'Reilly, O'Hare and O'Hara There's no one as Irish as Barack O'Bama 🤣
We stopped at Barack Obama Plaza (petrol station with restaurants) while we were in Ireland this March. Quite nice for a gas station.
Is that gelato at a GAS STATION???
Lmaooo true
