American Presidents

Trump's ancestors originated from Germany, on his father’s side, and from Scotland on his mother’s side. All his grandparents, and his mother, were born in Europe. Trump's paternal grandfather, Friedrich Trump, first emigrated to the United States in 1885 at the age of 16, and became a citizen in 1892. He amassed a fortune during the gold rush and married Elisabeth Christ in 1902. The couple settled in New York permanently in 1905. Donald's father, Fred Trump, was born in 1905 in the Bronx. Fred started working with his mother in real estate when he was 15, shortly after his father’s death. Their company, Elizabeth Trump and Son, was primarily active in the New York boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn. Fred eventually built and sold thousands of houses, barracks and apartments. The company would later become The Trump Organization after Donald Trump took over in 1971.

Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to a white mother and a black father. His mother was of mostly English descent, and his father was a Kenyan man. The couple married in Hawaii six months before Obama was born. Obama's mother moved with him to Seattle for a year, while Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964, where he married for a third time. He visited his son in Hawaii only once before he was killed in an automobile accident in 1982 when Obama was 21 years old. In 1963, Obama's mother met and married Lolo, who was Indonesian, and the family returned to Indonesia in 1966. From age six to ten, Obama attended local Indonesian-language schools, and during his time in Indonesia, Obama's stepfather taught him to be resilient and gave him a pretty hardheaded assessment of how the world worked. Obama returned to Honolulu in 1971 to live with his maternal grandparents.

George W. Bush was born in Connecticut, and raised in Houston, Texas. His grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, and his father, George H.W. Bush, was Ronald Reagan's Vice President. Bush has English and some German ancestry, and attended school in Texas, going on to Yale to study history. Bush then attended Harvard Business School, and graduated in 1975 with an MBA degree. He is the only U.S. president to have earned an MBA. At a backyard barbecue in 1977, friends introduced him to Laura Welch, a school teacher and librarian. After a three-month courtship, she accepted his marriage proposal and they wed on November 5 of that year. Prior to his marriage, Bush had multiple episodes of alcohol abuse. He said his wife had a stabilizing effect on his life, and attributes his 1986 decision to give up alcohol to her influence. He started his political career by becoming Governor of Texas in 1995.

George H.W. Bush was born in Massachusetts and the family moved to Connecticut shortly after his birth. Growing up, he used the nickname ‘Poppy’. Bush began his formal education in Greenwich, and held a number of leadership positions. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy immediately after graduating from Phillips Academy on his eighteenth birthday, and became a naval aviator. Through 1944, he flew 58 combat missions for which he was highly decorated. George Bush married Barbara Pierce in Rye, New York in 1945, and went on to study at Yale University. After graduating from Yale, Bush moved his young family to West Texas as he ventured into the oil business, starting as an oil field equipment salesman. He started the Bush-Overbey Oil Development Company, an oil company that drilled in the Permian Basin in Texas, and this enabled him to become a millionaire, with a net worth of $20 million in 2015.