The incredible Bridget Kennedy

The seeds of a great family were planted by an Irish immigrant in the 1800s

JFK and Jackie Kennedy at the White House.

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One of the underlying ideas of this blog is that families can either expand on or limit opportunities for their members over time. I’ve written in the past, for example, about how my distant relatives spent 150 years gradually building a political dynasty, to the point that they’re now U.S. Senators. Not everyone wants a political dynasty, but the point is that the actions of each generation opened doors for the people who came next. This happens in lots of fields, such as show business, where generation after generation benefits from their predecessors’ network. And I’m constantly learning about new examples in this genre. For example, Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, who I only recently learned is a third generation wrestling star.

I’m fascinated by these examples because, like most parents, I’d love for my kids to have an even better life than I’ve had (and my life is pretty good). I don’t know if my descendants will be senators, movie stars, professional wrestlers or something else altogether. But I’d love for them to be able to choose from all of the above. And it’s clear from innumerable examples that the decisions one generation makes have a profound impact on what opportunities are available to subsequent generations.

Enter Bridget Kennedy.

The Kennedy’s are probably the most famous American example of this intergenerational door opening¹, and to understand them better I recently started reading a new book called The First Kennedys: The Humble Roots of an American Dynasty by author Neal Thompson.

The book is great, but rather than discuss the famous Kennedys of Camelot (or the current Kennedys, who are still around), it goes way back to the mid 1800s and offers a profile of Bridget Murphy Kennedy, the founding matriarch of the family. Incredibly, Bridget doesn’t have a Wikipedia page², and even in Thompson’s deeply researched telling of her story there are a lot of unknowns. But what is clear is that she came from extremely humble circumstances, then made decisions that had material benefits way down the road.

Here are some of the details the book mentions about Bridget’s early life:

• Bridget Murphy Kennedy was born to poor Irish tenant farmers and grew up in a one-room farmhouse made of stone and mud. The building had a thatched roof and was 36 feet long by 16 feet wide. The floor would have been made of clay, with hay for bedding³.

• Bridget’s parents apparently had an arranged marriage. The arrangement was made while their own parents were selling a litter of pigs to each other⁴.

• She emigrated to the U.S. during the Irish potato famine in the 1840s, which killed at least 1 million people. Though it’s not clear which specific voyage brought her to the New World, Thompson details several potential ships that might have ferried her, and they all sound absolutely miserable. Thompson repeatedly uses the term “coffin ship” to describe the cramped, disease ridden conditions on board. Many people died on these voyages⁵.

• When she arrived, Bridget Kennedy became a maid in Boston. Her name, Bridget, was so common among Irish domestic workers at that time that it became a kind of synonym for the word servant.

• Bridget and her fellow immigrants faced intense anti-Irish bigotry at the time, including regular mobs that marched through the streets throwing bricks at homes and people. In some cases, the mobs threatened to pull down Catholic churches. Sometimes members of the Irish community died in the chaos. Over time, anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry gave rise to a bunch of political gangs that managed to codify some of their racist views into laws⁶.

• Bridget’s oldest son, John, died in 1855 from an intestinal disease when he was 20 months old. She and her husband then struggled to find a place to bury the baby because city officials had made it illegal for Catholics to be buried within city limits⁷ ⁸.

• In 1858, Bridget had a second son, P.J., from whom the famous Kennedy clan would descend. But later that year, Bridget’s husband Patrick died of consumption⁹ at the age of 35 — leaving Bridget the sole provider of the family and the protagonist of this story.

• In between the death of her son and the death of her husband, Bridget lived through the Panic of 1857, which thanks to the telegraph was the first economic downturn to spread rapidly through the U.S.

The book goes on to follow Bridget’s gradual rise from a poor servant to something more following the death of her husband. In the interest of keeping this post short, I’ll save some of those highlights for the next post.

But it’s worth pausing here to reflect on what a both difficult and remarkable experience Bridget Kennedy had. In 1858 she was a grieving and impoverish immigrant, a newly single mother of four kids, and the occupant of a squalid tenement where mob violence raged outside. Just 89 years later, her great grandson, JFK, would become a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Another 14 years after that, and JFK would assume the presidency. It was a truly remarkable ascent for the Kennedy family. PJ Kennedy, Bridget’s son who was born in the tenement and never knew his father, lived to see JFK himself nearly reach the age of 12.

The foundation Bridget laid also didn’t stop with JFK and his politician brothers Ted and Bobby. Did you know, for instance, that actor Chris Pratt is married to a member of the Kennedy family? That means Bridget is the great great great great grandma of Star Lord’s kids. A number of other still-living Kennedys are involved in politics, law, philanthropy and various other endeavors.

Not every family needs to be, or can be, or should be the Kennedys. But the Kennedys are still a useful case study in how the smart decisions of one person continued to open doors for a multitude of people who came later.

I don’t know what lies ahead for my own kids. But I suspect they will be happier in their lives if they have more opportunities, rather than fewer. I suspect they will be happier if their own kids also have more opportunities, and are happier themselves in turn. And so on down the line. And for that reason, I find the stories like that of Bridget Kennedy to be instructive, and inspiring.

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1. This post is not a commentary on the Kennedys’ politics. I’m not an expert on that topic, and the point here is not political but rather about intergenerational family. Perhaps next time I’ll read a book about the Bush family.

2. There also doesn’t seem to be any images of Bridget, hence the photo of JFK at the top of this post.

3. Page 36

4. Page 36

5. Page 27

6. Page 93-101

7. Page 102-103

8. It’s tempting to write off infant deaths like this as just the “normal” way of things back in the day when infant mortality was high. But Thompson writes that the baby’s death was in fact a “shocking, deflating blow” for the fledgling Kennedy family. Even if death was more common back then, the loss of a child (and not long after a spouse) must have been crushing.

9. Page 111