From Washington to Obama - the presidents with North West links

Former US President Barack Obama is coming to Manchester later this year as his stage show returns to the UK.

His visit has renewed hopes that he might make the short journey down the M62 to Liverpool – a city that played a significant role in his family's history.

But Obama – whose great-great-grandfather sailed to America from the port city in 1850 in search of a better life – is not the only former US president with ties to the north-west of England.

The links between some of his predecessors and the region are even stronger.

Visitors to Manchester can find a statue of Abraham Lincoln.

During the American Civil War, Manchester boycotted cotton picked in the southern states in protest against the use of slave labour by the Confederacy.

This led to mass unemployment and poverty among textile workers in Manchester.

Lincoln wrote a letter praising the working people of the city for their "sublime Christian heroism" in helping the Union to prevail.

The statue, by George Grey Barnard, was originally erected in the grounds of Platt Hall in Platt Fields Park in 1919.

It was moved to Lincoln Square on Brazennose Street in 1986, where it has remained ever since.

Both Presidents Bush can trace their families back to Chorley, in Lancashire, while the story of George Washington – the very first of the First Citizens – began in the village of Warton on the outskirts of Lancaster.

When Obama was elected the 44th president in 2008, his family history was quickly thrust into the spotlight.

Political opponents circulated discredited claims that he had been born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to be president under the terms of the US Constitution that require the commander-in-chief to have been born on American soil.

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, there was interest in the small but pivotal part that Liverpool played in the Obama origins story.

In the 1840s, Ireland suffered the Great Famine, which saw up to one million people die of starvation or disease in the wake of a potato blight in 1845. In the following decade, an estimated 1.5 million Irish people emigrated to the US.

Among them was Joseph Kearney, a shoemaker who sailed from Liverpool to New York in 1849 to take over his late brother's farm in the Appalachian Mountains.

The following year his son, Falmouth Kearney, made the same journey from Liverpool.

Fast-forward to 2011, and Falmouth's great-great-grandson, Obama, went to the village of Monegall in County Ofally, visiting the local pub and trying a pint of Guinness, and making a joke about how he was there "in search of the apostrophe" missing from the 'O' in his name.

That transatlantic journey buoyed hopes that Obama would drop in to Liverpool and take up a formal invitation from the city made following his inauguration as president in January 2009.

While he never made it, Steve Rotheram, who was lord mayor of Liverpool at the time and is now the city region's metro-mayor, told the BBC the city "still extends that welcome".

If the name Myles Standish is uttered much these days in Lancashire, it is likely to come from passengers telling bus drivers which stop they wish to get off at.

Myles Standish Way is the name given to a tree-lined stretch of road between Chorley and the village of Heath Charnock.

Standish the man was a major historic figure, central to the birth of the United States of America.

He was one of the Pilgrim Fathers who sailed to the New World on the Mayflower in 1620.

George W Bush, Obama's predecessor, can be said to trace his family line back to Standish, but there has been debate for some time about whether Standish was actually from Chorley.

However, during Bush Jr's time in the White House, a historical society in Chorley conducted detailed research into Standish and found compelling evidence to debunk claims that he had hailed from the Isle of Man.

Among the information uncovered was that Standish had educated his children with texts from Rivington Grammar School, near Bolton, which had opened 54 years before Standish set sail for America.

There are, however, more recent links between the Bush family and the Red Rose county.

Bush Jr's great-grandfather, George Walker from Missouri, attended the famous Stonyhurst College in Hurst Green near Clitheroe from 1892 to 1894.

Like the Chorley historical society, the school used Bush Jr's election as president to invite him to make the journey over to Lancashire, as it had Bush Sr before him.

And like Obama's invitation to Liverpool, Bush Jr's invitation to Lancashire remains open.

One president was a repeat visitor to the north-west of England, however.

In the centre of Carlisle is a J D Wetherspoon pub called The Woodrow Wilson, named in honour of the 28th president who was in office for eight years between 1913 and 1921, leading his country during World War One.

Prior to becoming president, Wilson – whose grandfather hailed from Carlisle, was a regular visitor to the Lake District, spending five summers there.

According to author Andrew Wilson, his final visit in 1919 came while his namesake was on his way to a post-war peace conference.

It is not known whether Woodrow Wilson was aware that the family of the first president – George Washington (in office 1789 – 1797) – had its origins in a village on the other side of the Lakes – Warton, near Lancaster.

While the Washingtons are believed to have left the area for the Midlands in the 16th Century, connections remain to this day.

Every 4 July, to mark Independence Day, the parish church of St Oswald's flies a US flag.

The stars and stripes are thought to have been based on the Washington family crest.

And while Washington has been immortalised with countless statues, portraits and busts in the last 200 years, he is remembered in Warton in a most typically English way.

He has a pub named after him.

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