The Kennedys: From a Wexford Farm to the White House, 1823 to 2020
Four generations of one Irish family, from a tenant farm in County Wexford to the presidency and back to the same farmyard. Each chapter is a generation, with the Fitzgeralds, Rose Kennedy's family, as a parallel line. Every person is a lifespan from birth to death, so the Spans view shows who overlapped with whom; the Map draws the arc from Dunganstown to East Boston, Brookline and Hyannis Port. The records of poor emigrants are thin and often contradict each other, and where they do, the event says so. The timeline ends with the nine children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, the last of whom died in 2020.
Patrick Kennedy (c.1823-1858)
A tenant farmer's third son from County Wexford. He left during the famine and was dead nine years later. • Born: about 1823, Dunganstown, near New Ross, County Wexford. No birth record survives; the card sits at mid-year. • Died: 22 November 1858, East Boston • Married: Bridget Murphy, 26 September 1849, Boston • Children: 5: Mary, Joanna, John, Margaret and Patrick Joseph • Occupation: cooper He made barrels at a cooperage on Noddle's Island in East Boston. His son John died before he was two. His last child, Patrick Joseph, was born in January 1858, and Patrick died ten months later, aged about thirty-five. The date was 22 November. One hundred and five years later to the day, his great-grandson was shot in Dallas. Sources disagree on the cause of death, cholera or consumption, and on the year he arrived, 1847 or 1849.
Bridget Murphy (c.1824-1888)
Widowed in her early thirties with four children, she kept a shop and made the family's first money. • Born: about 1824, County Wexford. Sources give years from 1821 to 1827. • Died: 20 December 1888, Boston (date from a single source) • Married: Patrick Kennedy, 26 September 1849 • Children: 5, four of whom survived After Patrick's death she worked in a notions and stationery shop near the East Boston ferry, then bought it, and expanded it into a grocery that also sold liquor. The grocery paid for her son's start. In the Boston of the 1850s her first name was the generic word for an Irish maid. Sources disagree on her birth year and on whether she met Patrick on the crossing or already knew him in Wexford.
Leaving Wexford
1849. Patrick Kennedy left Ireland in the fourth year of the Great Famine, one of more than a million who emigrated while it lasted. Family tradition has him sailing from New Ross, the river port a few miles from the farm. One detailed account has him crossing from Liverpool on the packet ship Washington Irving and landing in Boston on 22 April 1849; that is the date used here. No passenger list has been matched to him with certainty. The farm went to an elder brother. The third son got the passage.
Marriage in Boston
26 September 1849, Boston. Patrick Kennedy married Bridget Murphy five months after landing. The celebrant was Father John Williams, later Archbishop of Boston. One account places the wedding in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, another in the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer in East Boston. The couple settled in East Boston, where he worked. Their first child, Mary, was born in 1851.
P. J. Kennedy (1858-1929)
Saloon keeper, state legislator and ward boss. The first Kennedy to hold office. • Born: 14 January 1858, East Boston • Died: 18 May 1929, Boston • Parents: Patrick Kennedy and Bridget Murphy • Married: Mary Augusta Hickey, 1887 • Children: 4, including Joseph Patrick He left school young, worked on the docks, bought a saloon in Haymarket Square and then others, then a liquor importing business, and later interests in coal and a bank. He sat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the state Senate, and preferred the back room to the podium. He was ten months old when his father died.
John F. Fitzgerald, Honey Fitz (1863-1950)
Rose Kennedy's father. Congressman, twice mayor of Boston, and the grandfather after whom John F. Kennedy was named. • Born: 11 February 1863, North End, Boston • Died: 2 October 1950, Boston • Parents: Thomas Fitzgerald, from Bruff, County Limerick, and Rosanna Cox, from County Cavan • Married: Mary Josephine Hannon, 1889 • Children: 6, including Rose He served in Congress from 1895 to 1901 and as mayor from 1906 to 1908 and again from 1910 to 1914. He was called Honey Fitz for his voice, and he sang Sweet Adeline at nearly every public appearance. In 1946 he watched his grandson win a Boston congressional seat, as he had half a century before.
Joseph P. Kennedy (1888-1969)
Banker, film producer, first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, ambassador to Britain. The one who made the money. • Born: 6 September 1888, East Boston • Died: 18 November 1969, Hyannis Port, Massachusetts • Parents: P. J. Kennedy and Mary Augusta Hickey • Married: Rose Fitzgerald, 7 October 1914 • Children: 9 Harvard, class of 1912. At twenty-five he was president of the Columbia Trust Company, a small East Boston bank his father had helped to found. He made his fortune in banking, the stock market, Hollywood and real estate. Roosevelt made him the first chairman of the SEC in 1934 and ambassador in London in 1938. He favoured appeasement, and his public career ended in 1940. A stroke in December 1961 left him unable to speak clearly for the last eight years of his life.
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1890-1995)
Mother of nine, daughter of a mayor, and the family's record keeper. • Born: 22 July 1890, North End, Boston • Died: 22 January 1995, Hyannis Port, aged 104 • Parents: John F. Fitzgerald and Mary Josephine Hannon • Married: Joseph P. Kennedy, 7 October 1914 She kept an index card for each of her nine children, recording illnesses, vaccinations, dental visits and weights, and maintained the file for decades. She outlived four of the nine: Joseph Jr., Kathleen, John and Robert. She is buried at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, a short walk from the house where John was born.
Joseph and Rose Marry
7 October 1914, Boston. Joseph Kennedy married Rose Fitzgerald in the private chapel of Cardinal William O'Connell, who performed the ceremony. The grandson of a Wexford cooper married the daughter of the mayor of Boston, whose father had come from Limerick. Her father had long preferred other suitors. They had nine children in seventeen years, the same number and the same span as Queen Victoria.
Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. (1915-1944)
The eldest son, the one his father meant to be president. • Born: 25 July 1915, Hull, Massachusetts • Died: 12 August 1944, over Blythburgh, Suffolk, England • Honours: Navy Cross, posthumous A Navy bomber pilot, he had finished his tour of missions and volunteered for Operation Aphrodite, in which a bomber loaded with about 21,000 pounds of explosive was to be flown toward a German target by remote control after the crew bailed out. It exploded over Suffolk before he could jump. No body was recovered. He was twenty-nine.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
The second son, and the 35th President of the United States. • Born: 29 May 1917, 83 Beals Street, Brookline, Massachusetts • Died: 22 November 1963, Dallas, Texas • Married: Jacqueline Bouvier, 12 September 1953 • Children: 4, two of whom survived infancy • President: 20 January 1961 to 22 November 1963 He was a sickly child. When PT-109, the torpedo boat he commanded, was cut in two by a Japanese destroyer on 2 August 1943, he towed a burned crewman to an island by a life-jacket strap held in his teeth. His elder brother's death made him the heir to his father's plans. He was elected to Congress in 1946, the Senate in 1952 and the presidency in 1960, the first Roman Catholic to hold it. He was forty-six when he was shot.
Rosemary Kennedy (1918-2005)
The eldest daughter, hidden by her family for twenty years, and the reason for the Special Olympics. • Born: 13 September 1918, Brookline, Massachusetts • Died: 7 January 2005, Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin She developed more slowly than her siblings from early childhood, and her parents concealed it. In November 1941, aged twenty-three, she underwent a lobotomy arranged by her father, which left her unable to walk or speak clearly. She spent most of the rest of her life at St. Coletta, a Catholic institution in Wisconsin, and was rarely mentioned in public until her sister Eunice wrote about her in 1962.
Kathleen Kennedy, Kick (1920-1948)
The daughter who stayed in England, married a duke's heir, and was widowed within four months. • Born: 20 February 1920, Brookline, Massachusetts • Died: 13 May 1948, near Privas, Ardèche, France • Married: William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, 6 May 1944, Chelsea Register Office, London She lived in London while her father was ambassador and went back during the war. She married the heir to the Duke of Devonshire, a Protestant, in a register office; her mother opposed it, and the only member of her family present was her brother Joseph. Her husband was killed by a sniper in Belgium that September. She died at twenty-eight when a private plane carrying her to the Riviera crashed in the mountains of the Ardèche, and is buried at Edensor, near Chatsworth.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver (1921-2009)
Founder of the Special Olympics. • Born: 10 July 1921, Brookline, Massachusetts • Died: 11 August 2009, Hyannis, Massachusetts • Married: Sargent Shriver, 23 May 1953 • Children: 5 In 1962 she ran a summer day camp for children and adults with intellectual disabilities in the grounds of her house in Maryland. In July 1968 it became the first International Special Olympics Summer Games, at Soldier Field in Chicago, with about a thousand athletes. Her sister Rosemary was the reason, and she said so in print.
Patricia Kennedy Lawford (1924-2006)
The daughter who married Hollywood. • Born: 6 May 1924, Brookline, Massachusetts • Died: 17 September 2006, New York City • Married: Peter Lawford, 24 April 1954; divorced 1966 • Children: 4 Her husband, the English actor Peter Lawford, connected the family to Frank Sinatra's circle during the 1960 campaign. She was the first of the nine to divorce. In later life she founded the National Committee for the Literary Arts in New York.
Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968)
Campaign manager, Attorney General, senator, candidate. • Born: 20 November 1925, Brookline, Massachusetts • Died: 6 June 1968, Los Angeles • Married: Ethel Skakel, 17 June 1950 • Children: 11 He managed his brother's campaigns and served as his Attorney General. After Dallas he was elected senator for New York in 1964. On 5 June 1968, minutes after winning the California Democratic primary, he was shot in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He died the next day, aged forty-two.
Jean Kennedy Smith (1928-2020)
The last of the nine, and United States ambassador to Ireland. • Born: 20 February 1928, Boston • Died: 17 June 2020, New York City, aged 92 • Married: Stephen Edward Smith, 19 May 1956 • Children: 4 In 1974 she founded Very Special Arts, for artists with disabilities. In 1993 President Clinton made her ambassador to Ireland, and she served until 1998, through the talks that led to the Good Friday Agreement. A century and a half after Patrick Kennedy left Wexford, his great-granddaughter presented her credentials in Dublin.
Edward M. Kennedy (1932-2009)
The youngest, and a senator for nearly forty-seven years. • Born: 22 February 1932, Boston • Died: 25 August 2009, Hyannis Port, Massachusetts • Married: Joan Bennett, 1958; Victoria Reggie, 1992 • Children: 3 He took his brother John's old Senate seat in 1962, at thirty, the minimum age, and held it until his death. In July 1969 he drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned. His challenge for the 1980 Democratic nomination failed. He gave the eulogy for his brother Robert at St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1968.
Return to Dunganstown
27 June 1963, New Ross and Dunganstown, County Wexford. The President spoke on the quay at New Ross, then drove to the farm his great-grandfather had left. In the farmyard a cousin, Mary Ryan, served him tea. At New Ross he told the crowd that if his great-grandfather had stayed, he might have been working at the fertiliser works across the river. Five months later he was dead.