Long before the motorcades, packed stadiums and history-making nights in Washington, Barack Obama was simply “Barry”—a boy trying to understand where he belonged.

This remarkable family photograph from the early 1970s captures a chapter of Obama’s life that many people know surprisingly little about. Standing beside his mother, Ann Dunham, his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, and his young half-sister, Maya, the future president appears to be part of an ordinary family.

But behind the smiles was a childhood shaped by divorce, political upheaval, cultural clashes and questions of identity that would follow him for decades.

Barack Hussein Obama II was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961. His mother was an 18-year-old student from Kansas, while his father, Barack Obama Sr., was a Kenyan student studying in Hawaii. Their marriage was brief and complicated. Obama’s father eventually left Hawaii, and the couple divorced when their son was still very young.

The man whose name he carried became a distant and almost mythical figure.

Obama would later describe how difficult it was to build an image of a father he barely knew. The two met only once after his parents separated, when Obama Sr. visited Hawaii in 1971. The reunion lasted about a month. Eleven years later, his father was killed in a car accident in Kenya.

By then, Obama’s life had already taken another dramatic turn.

His mother married Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro, and in 1967, six-year-old Barack moved with them to Jakarta. Indonesia was emerging from a period of enormous political violence and instability. For a child arriving from Hawaii, it was a completely different world.

The family did not initially live in luxury. Obama encountered unpaved streets, unfamiliar food, roaming animals and visible poverty. He attended local schools, learned to speak some Indonesian and experienced daily life far removed from the comfortable surroundings associated with a future American president.

His mother reportedly woke him before sunrise to teach him English using American correspondence-course materials. Obama later recalled resisting those exhausting lessons, but Ann was determined that her son would not fall behind.

There were also moments that later sounded almost unbelievable to American audiences. Obama wrote about eating unusual foods, including dog meat and snake, during his childhood in Indonesia. Political opponents would seize on such details decades later, but for Obama they were part of a larger story: a boy learning to adapt wherever life placed him.

In 1970, Ann and Lolo welcomed a daughter, Maya Soetoro. The family photograph from this period shows the unit they had created—but its stability would not last.

Ann gradually became concerned about Barack’s education and future. At ten years old, he was sent back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham. His mother and sister remained in Indonesia for a time, meaning that Obama once again had to adjust to separation from the people closest to him.

He attended Honolulu’s prestigious Punahou School on a scholarship. Yet even in paradise, his teenage years were not without turmoil. As one of relatively few Black students at the school, Obama struggled with race, identity and belonging.

He admitted in his memoir that he experimented with alcohol, marijuana and cocaine during his youth—confessions that would later create sensational headlines during his political rise. Obama described the behavior not as glamorous rebellion but as an attempt to silence uncomfortable questions about who he was.

Friends knew him as Barry. He played basketball obsessively and searched for a place within different social groups. Few could have imagined that the lanky teenager on the court would one day become the most powerful political figure in the country.

After graduating from high school, Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles before transferring to Columbia University in New York. He later moved to Chicago, worked as a community organizer and entered Harvard Law School, where he became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review.

In Chicago, he also met Michelle Robinson, the lawyer assigned to mentor him at a law firm. She initially resisted his romantic interest, but they married in 1992. Their partnership would become one of the most recognizable marriages in modern political history.

Obama’s rise was astonishingly fast. His 2004 Democratic National Convention speech turned him into a national sensation almost overnight. Four years later, Americans elected him as their first African American president.

But perhaps the most fascinating part of his story is not where he ended up—it is where he began.

The boy in this photograph had already lived across continents, lost daily contact with both biological parents and wrestled with questions of race and identity before reaching adolescence. The polished president the world eventually saw was shaped by a childhood that was anything but conventional.

Before he became Barack Obama, he first had to discover who “Barry” really was.