Mississippi investigator Jorge L. Baro says that he swore (although the notary’s signature is blank) that some unnamed people he hired told him that they had talked to Beatrice Arakaki in Hawaii and that she told them that 47 years ago in 1961 there was no black baby living next door to her at the address in the Sunday Advertiser announcement of Obama’s birth.

#6085 Kalanianaole circa 1961 - Honolulu Advertiser

According to the Honolulu Advertiser, it was practice to get birth announcements from the Health Department via a news service, not from private submissions, as evidenced by that fact that two independent newspapers had the same announcement with the same announcements for other infants before and after. The announcement had to come from the Health Department, via the birth registration. So what gives?  Did they live there or not? It all becomes clear with careful reading and examination of the evidence.

Option A

Let’s assume for a moment that everything that Baro says about the interview is true (but not perhaps complete).

Look carefully at the signed statement from the Mississippi PI,  Baro from which the information related to Obama residences comes.

[Baro writes:] Investigators contacted Beatrice Arakaki, who lived at 6075 Kalanianaole Highway in Honolulu, Hawaii. Ms. Arakaki’s residence is next door [sic] to the alleged residence of Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack H. Obama Sr. at 6085 Kalanianaole Highway at the time the Senator was born in 1961. Ms. Arakaki said she has lived at her current residence on Kalanianaole since before 1961 to the present day. Ms. Arakaki said she had knowledge of the family living in Waikiki and not on Kalanianaole Highway.

Now exactly who is “the family” in that sentence? It clearly says “Stanley Ann Dunham [sic] and Barack H. Obama Sr.” lived elsewhere.  It does not say that Stanley Ann’s parents,  Stan and Madelyn Dunham, didn’t live there. Indeed, we know that Stan and Madelyn Dunham did live on Kalanianaole Highway from 1960 to 1963 as evidenced by an article from the Honolulu Advertiser:

[Stanley Ann] and her parents, Kansas couple Stan Dunham, a furniture store operator, and Madelyn Dunham (”Toot,” to Obama), a bank cashier, had come to Hawai’i in 1960 and moved into the Kalaniana’ole location. … By 1963 the Dunhams had moved into Apartment 110 of a six-year-old building at 1427 Alexander Street, records show.

Since the Dunham’s did live next door, it makes perfect sense that Ms. Arakaki would know where the Obama family, her neighbor’s kids, lived as she claimed. If the Dunham family did NOT live next door, how in the world would Ms. Arakaki know where some obscure college kids who had only been in the city a year lived?

Since the Dunhams lived at the birth registration address, it would not have been criminal or fraudulent for Stanley Ann to have put down her mother’s address as her “usual residence”, especially if she were in transition from one place to another, or was unsure where they were going to live, or if (as the newspaper suggested) they intended to or actually did live in the “cottage out back”. There are half a dozen perfectly legal, harmless and plausible reasons why Stanley Ann Obama would have listed her parents’ address on her hospital form.

Because we have no transcript of the Arakaki interview, only a biased summary, we do not know how much other information was provided that could totally change the meaning of the interview.

There is simply nothing in this record that credibly challenges the birth announcement.

Option B

Is the Arakaki interview essentially true? The comments to this article suggest that it is not, and that public records show that Arakaki did not live at the house in question in 1961. (See comments.) In that case, we would assume that the “usual address” of Stanley Ann Obama was indeed 6085 Kalanianaole Highway (perhaps in the cottage out back). The birth registration would have made no assertion that she lived there with Barack Obama Sr. We know they were soon separated and eventually divorced. We don’t know that they were still living together on August 4, 1961. Indeed there is a lot we don’t know about the early details of the Obama marriage, and no one is left alive that can tell us. We do, however, have a newspaper birth announcement which is about all we can rely on at this point.

[Updated]

Evidence from a contemporary city directory confirms that the Dunhams lived at 6085 Kalanianaole, and that Ann Obama lived with them.