Ethel Skakel Kennedy

Patrick Joseph Kennedy, known as P. J., was a Boston businessman and Democratic ward leader who established the family's place in Massachusetts politics. Born in East Boston in 1858, he was the son of Irish immigrants from Dunganstown, County Wexford, and worked the docks before building interests in the liquor trade and later in banking. He was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives and afterwards to the state Senate, and as one of the ward bosses who ran Democratic Boston at the turn of the century he was both colleague and rival of John F. Fitzgerald. With his wife, Mary Augusta Hickey, he was the father of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and the grandfather of President John F. Kennedy.

John Francis Fitzgerald, universally known as Honey Fitz, was a congressman and twice Mayor of Boston, and the maternal grandfather of President John F. Kennedy. Born in the North End of Boston in 1863 to Irish immigrant parents, he rose through the city's Democratic organisation, served in the Massachusetts Senate and the United States House of Representatives, and was elected mayor in 1905 and again in 1910. A famously gregarious campaigner and singer of "Sweet Adeline", he was the rival and eventual in-law of P. J. Kennedy. His daughter Rose married Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. in 1914. He lived to see his grandson elected to Congress in 1946.

John F. Kennedy was the 35th President of the United States, serving from January 1961 until his death in November 1963. The second son of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, he was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1917, graduated from Harvard in 1940, and commanded the patrol torpedo boat PT-109 in the Pacific, receiving the Navy and Marine Corps Medal after its sinking. He represented Massachusetts in the House of Representatives from 1947 and in the Senate from 1953, won the Pulitzer Prize for "Profiles in Courage", and married Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953. As president he faced the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, founded the Peace Corps, committed the nation to the Moon landing and sent Congress the civil rights bill enacted in 1964. He was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, at the age of forty-six.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver was an American philanthropist and the founder of the Special Olympics, the international sports movement for people with intellectual disabilities. The fifth child of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, she was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1921 and educated at Stanford. She worked for the State Department and in juvenile justice before taking over the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, where she pressed her brother's administration to create the President's Panel on Mental Retardation. In 1962 she opened Camp Shriver at her Maryland home, which grew into the first International Special Olympics Games in Chicago in 1968. She married Sargent Shriver in 1953, had five children including Maria Shriver, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984.

Jean Kennedy Smith was United States Ambassador to Ireland from 1993 to 1998 and the founder of the arts and disability organisation VSA. The eighth child of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, she was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1928 and educated at Manhattanville College. She married the businessman and campaign manager Stephen Edward Smith in 1956 and in 1974 founded Very Special Arts, which created arts programmes for people with disabilities in dozens of countries. Appointed ambassador by President Bill Clinton, she played a public part in the diplomacy surrounding the Northern Ireland peace process and was later granted honorary Irish citizenship. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 and was the last surviving sibling of President John F. Kennedy.

Patrick J. Kennedy is an American politician and mental health advocate who represented Rhode Island in the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 2011. The youngest child of Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Joan Bennett Kennedy, he was born in 1967 and elected to the Rhode Island House of Representatives at twenty-one while still a student at Providence College. In Congress he was a lead author of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008, which required insurers to cover mental health and addiction treatment on the same terms as physical illness. After leaving office he founded the Kennedy Forum and co-founded One Mind for Research, and co-wrote the book "A Common Struggle".

Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was an American businessman, investor and diplomat, and the father of President John F. Kennedy. Born in Boston in 1888 to the politician P. J. Kennedy, he was educated at Boston Latin School and Harvard, became a bank president in his twenties, and made a large fortune in banking, shipbuilding, film production and the liquor import trade. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934 and United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1938, a post he left in 1940. With his wife, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, he had nine children, and he devoted his later years and his fortune to their political careers and to the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation.

Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy was the matriarch of the Kennedy family, the daughter of Boston mayor John F. Fitzgerald and the mother of President John F. Kennedy. Born in Boston's North End in 1890, she was educated in convent schools in Boston, the Netherlands and Manhattanville, and acted as her father's hostess during his mayoralty before marrying Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. in 1914. She raised their nine children with strict Catholic discipline and a famous set of household record cards, campaigned for her sons in every election from 1946 onwards, and later published the bestselling memoir "Times to Remember". Made a papal countess in 1951, she lived to the age of 104, outliving four of her children.

Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. was the eldest of the nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, and the brother on whom the family's political hopes first rested. Born in Hull, Massachusetts, in 1915, he was educated at Choate, Harvard and briefly the London School of Economics, served as a Massachusetts delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention, and entered Harvard Law School before enlisting as a naval aviator after the outbreak of the Second World War. He flew anti-submarine patrols from England and volunteered for a hazardous experimental bombing mission over the Channel in August 1944, on which he was killed at the age of twenty-nine. The Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation was established in his memory.

Rosemary Kennedy was the third child and eldest daughter of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1918. She grew up between Brookline, Bronxville and Hyannis Port, and in 1938 was presented at the Court of St James's alongside her sister Kathleen while their father served as United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom. From 1949 she lived at the St Coletta school in Jefferson, Wisconsin, where she was regularly visited by her mother and her brothers and sisters for the rest of her life. Her life shaped the family's long commitment to people with intellectual disabilities, expressed most publicly in her sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver's founding of the Special Olympics. She died in 2005 at the age of eighty-six.

Kathleen Kennedy Cavendish, Marchioness of Hartington, known in the family as Kick, was the fourth child of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1920, she became a favourite of London society during her father's ambassadorship and was named debutante of the year in 1938. She returned to wartime London as a Red Cross volunteer and in May 1944 married William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, heir to the Duke of Devonshire, a match across the Catholic and Anglican divide that strained relations with her mother. Her husband was killed in action in Belgium four months later. She remained in England and died in an aeroplane accident in France in 1948, aged twenty-eight, and is buried at Chatsworth.