Patrick Kennedy (1823–1858)

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Patrick Kennedy (c. 1823 – November 22, 1858) was the father of P. J. Kennedy and great grandfather to former United States President John F. Kennedy. He was born in Dunganstown, County Wexford, Ireland, and emigrated to the United States, settling in East Boston, Massachusetts.

[edit] Early life and Penal times

Patrick was the son of James Kennedy (c.1770-c.1840) and Maria Kennedy (c.1779-c.February 16, 1835). James Kennedy inherited the small farm at Dunganstown from his father John Kennedy during the Penal law times in Ireland.

Patrick Kennedy most likely received a meagre education by attending one of the "hedge schools", held in a private home or barn. As part of the Penal Laws, Catholics were not allowed their own schools until 1782, and their political situation was somewhat improved when Catholic Emancipation was enacted when Kennedy was six years old (in 1829).

[edit] Adulthood

By the time Patrick reached adulthood, both his parents were apparently dead and the family homestead was controlled by his older brother John Kennedy, more than a dozen years Patrick's senior, who was already married and the father of four children. Under these circumstances, the tiny family house in Dunganstown was surely cramped. The eldest son normally inherited whatever claims existed to the family's farm. Because of the life-threatening scarcity of food and resources, the rest of the children, such as third son Patrick Kennedy, usually were expected to leave for the New World. Patrick also had a brother James and a sister Mary.

Patrick's life as a farmer in Dunganstown consisted mainly of cutting and tying bundles of grain by hand, and planting and tilling potatoes for his family's consumption. This routine varied only when he ventured into the nearest town, New Ross, with supplies of barley, and when the family attended mass about a mile away.

Several of Patrick's uncles had fought as pikemen in the 1798 rebellion, in which 5,000 rebels were slaughtered at New Ross. By 1848 whatever hope existed for Irish independence had faded with Daniel O'Connell's death and the crushed dreams of the Young Irelanders. Yet most devastating of all was the insidious arrival of a potato blight and, accompanying it, the Irish Potato Famine.

At the age of twenty six, Patrick had few options before him. Whether for reasons of starvation or illness or because he knew that a third-born son had virtually no hope of running his family's small, failing farm, Kennedy decided to leave. Ireland could no longer sustain his hopes for the future. His good friend at Cherry Bros. Brewery in New Ross, Patrick Barron, who taught Kennedy the skills of coopering, had come to that conclusion months earlier and left bound for America. In October 1848, in love with Barron's cousin Bridget Murphy and with a plan to wed, Patrick Kennedy decided to follow. [1]

Squalid conditions were what Patrick faced on board the vessel that brought him to America, often referred to as a "coffin ship". Arriving in Boston, Patrick Barron helped to settle him into Boston life and organised his coopering job on Noddle's island in east Boston. Not long after, Bridget, his fiancée made her way to Boston and six months later they were married, on September 26, 1849 in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, Massachusetts.

[edit] Children

The Kennedys had five children as follows:

The arrival of their fifth child was a particularly happy occasion after the death of John. However that same year thirty five year old Kennedy succumbed to the highly infectious cholera that infested East Boston, and died on November 22, 1858—105 years to the day before his great-grandson John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Bridget Kennedy later went on to buy a stationery and notions store in east Boston where she had worked. The business took off and expanded into a grocery and liquor store, which helped pave the way for the success of her son P. J. Kennedy.

The story of Patrick Kennedy has become probably the most famous of any of Ireland's millions of emigrants, due to the quick success of his children and grandchildren in American society and ultimately his great-grandson John F. Kennedy's election as the first Irish-American Catholic President (only Catholic to date). In June 1963, John F. Kennedy made a state visit to Ireland, in which he visited Dunganstown and New Ross in County Wexford in what was seen as a personal tribute to his ancestry.