06/29/2026
☘️ In 1849 a young man from County Wexford stepped off a ship in Boston Harbor and got a job making barrels. One hundred and eleven years later his great-grandson was sworn in as President of the United States. That is the Irish-American story in four generations.
His name was Patrick Kennedy. He was born in Dunganstown, County Wexford, the son of a farmer with no land to leave him. He arrived in Boston in 1849 at the height of the Famine emigration, found work as a cooper, married a woman named Bridget Murphy who had made the same crossing, and died of cholera in 1858 at thirty-five years old, leaving five children behind. He never became anything that history would have noticed. He was just a barrel maker who survived the crossing and died too young in a city that didn't want him.
His son Patrick Joseph, known as PJ, grew up without a father and went to work on the Boston docks as a teenager. He saved enough to buy a small saloon in East Boston and built it into a business. He became a ward boss, then a state senator. His son Joseph Kennedy Sr. went to Harvard, became a banker, made a fortune, became the US Ambassador to Great Britain, and spent his life trying to become the first Irish Catholic president of the United States. He never made it. The prejudice against Irish Catholics in American politics was still too deep.
His son made it. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was inaugurated as the 35th President of the United States on January 20, 1961. He was the first Catholic ever elected to the presidency. When he visited Ireland in June 1963, he stood in New Ross harbor in County Wexford, a few miles from the farm his great-grandfather had left, and told the crowd that his ancestors had departed these shores with no expectation of seeing them again. He said that if the day was clear enough and you looked west across the bay you could see Boston. The crowd that heard him say it understood exactly what he meant.
Patrick Kennedy the barrel maker died not knowing his great-grandson would be president. He just made barrels and survived and raised his children. That was enough. Follow The Irish Remembered for more. ☘️
