Obama's long road to the White House
1967 Ms Dunham divorces Mr Obama's father and marries Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student. When Mr Obama is six, they move to Jakarta, where he is privately educated.
1971 Aged 10, Mr Obama is sent back to Honolulu to live with his white grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham. He gets a scholarship to Punahou, a leading prep school.
1972 Ms Dunham returns to Hawaii with two-year-old daughter Maya, leaving her husband behind. Mr Obama's father visits from Kenya. It is the last time he sees him.
1979 Mr Obama attends Occidental College, Los Angeles. At the end of his second year, he transfers to Columbia University, New York, where he graduates with a BA, majoring in political science and international relations.
1982 Barack Obama Sr is killed, aged 46, in a car accident. Mr Obama decides to become a community organiser to confront the issues of race and poverty.
1983 First job after graduation is as a junior editor at a business publisher in Manhattan.
1984 Takes a job with a Chicago-based group called Developing Communities Project and successfully carries out several projects including schools reform.
1988 Before starting Harvard Law School, 26-year-old Obama visits Kenya to meet his father's family. At the end of his first year, a leading law firm hires him as a summer intern in Chicago. There he meets Michelle Robinson, a young Princeton and Harvard-educated lawyer, and they start dating.
1990 Mr Obama becomes the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review.
1991 He graduates from Harvard as a doctor of law with honours and begins to write an autobiography, Dreams From My Father.
1992 After returning to Chicago, Mr Obama starts working at the firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Gallard as a junior lawyer. He marries Michelle.
1995 His memoir, Dreams From My Father, is published where he talks about his relationship with his absent father, his views on race, experimenting with drugs and travelling to Kenya. A few months later his mother dies from ovarian cancer, aged 52.
1996 Mr Obama is elected to the Illinois State Senate as the Democrat representative for the 13th District, which incorporates the deprived and predominantly black Chicago South Side.
1998 The Obamas' first daughter is born. She is named Malia Ann. Her father is re-elected to the Illinois Senate.
1999 After running for Congress and losing, Mr Obama returns to the Illinois Senate.
2001 His second daughter, Natasha (known as Sasha) is born.
2003 He becomes chairman of the Illinois Senate's Health and Human Services Committee. In January, he formally enters the race for the US Senate. During the primaries, his Democratic rival, Blair Hull, takes the lead but after a short while drops out when domestic abuse allegations surface.
2004 Mr Obama is chosen to deliver the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, earning himself worldwide recognition. In November, at the age of 43, he is elected to the US Senate winning 70 per cent of the vote. He becomes the nation's fifth African-American Senator and takes an active role in Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.
2006 Publishes his second biography The Audacity Of Hope. It outlines his political dream and becomes a best-seller.
2007 He announces his candidacy for President on the steps of the Old State Capitol, where Abraham Lincoln famously spoke against slavery.
2008 This week, his grandmother Madelyn Dunham, dies from cancer aged 86.
