From Chicago to Trinity, girls’ journey goes on

To Sasha Obama it looked like the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft.

To her big sister Malia, it was the room from the Jedi Archives of Star Wars. But the Long Room of the Trinity College Dublin Library is where these two girls born on the southside of Chicago got to see the pictures and books tracing their Irish roots.

There — in the treasure trove of Irish history which contains 500,000 manuscripts including a copy of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic — 12-year-old Sasha peered over birth records, old maps showing the family homestead, and other documents tracing the ancestry of her father, US President Barack Obama, to Co Offaly.