Public Family Trees/Kennedy/John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr.
1960 - 1999 ยท Male ยท Washington, D.C., United States
Son of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis
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John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr.
1960 - 1999
John F. Kennedy Jr. was an American lawyer, journalist and magazine publisher, and the son of President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Born in Washington weeks after his father's election in 1960, he became one of the most photographed children in the world and was raised in New York by his mother after his father's assassination. He graduated from Brown University and New York University School of Lโฆ
Born1960
Born to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.
Family
A partnership that connects two branches of the Kennedy family.
Legacy
A defining role in the story of the Kennedy family.
Died1999
The close of a life whose connections continue through the family record.
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Gen 1 ยท 1858 - 1929
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.
Gen 1 ยท 1863 - 1950
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.
Gen 3 ยท 1921 - 2009
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.
Gen 3 ยท 1928 - 2020
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.
Gen 4 ยท b. 1967
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".
Gen 3 ยท 1915 - 1944
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.
Gen 4 ยท b. 1951
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is an American politician and author who served as Lieutenant Governor of Maryland from 1995 to 2003, the first woman to hold the office. The eldest child of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel Kennedy, she was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1951, graduated from Harvard and the University of New Mexico School of Law, and taught before entering public life. As lieutenant governor she led Maryland's crime prevention and juvenile justice work and created one of the first state requirements for student community service. She was the Democratic nominee for governor of Maryland in 2002 and has since worked on retirement security policy and written "Failing America's Faithful". She is a sister of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Rory Kennedy.
Gen 4 ยท b. 1952
Joseph P. Kennedy II is an American businessman and former congressman who represented Massachusetts in the United States House of Representatives from 1987 to 1999, holding the Boston seat once occupied by his uncle President John F. Kennedy. The eldest son of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel Kennedy, he was born in Boston in 1952 and educated at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In 1979 he founded Citizens Energy Corporation, a non-profit that used the proceeds of oil trading to supply discounted heating fuel to low income households, and he returned to lead it after leaving Congress. He is the father of the congressman Joseph P. Kennedy III.
Gen 4 ยท b. 1954
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an American lawyer and politician who became United States Secretary of Health and Human Services in 2025. The third child of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel Kennedy, he was born in Washington in 1954 and educated at Harvard, the London School of Economics, the University of Virginia School of Law and Pace University, where he later taught environmental law. For decades he practised as an environmental lawyer, serving as chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper and founding the Waterkeeper Alliance, and he wrote books including "Crimes Against Nature". He entered the 2024 presidential race as a Democrat and then as an independent before ending his campaign, and was subsequently nominated and confirmed to the federal cabinet. He is the father of Conor Kennedy.
Gen 5 ยท b. 1980
Joe Kennedy III is an American politician and diplomat who represented Massachusetts in the United States House of Representatives from 2013 to 2021. Born in Boston in 1980, the son of the congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II and a grandson of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, he graduated from Stanford and Harvard Law School and served in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic before working as an assistant district attorney in Massachusetts. In Congress he focused on health care, mental health parity and manufacturing, and he delivered the Democratic response to the State of the Union address in 2018. He ran for the Senate in 2020 and was later appointed United States Special Envoy to Northern Ireland for Economic Affairs.
Gen 5 ยท b. 1989
Katherine Schwarzenegger is an American author, the eldest child of the journalist Maria Shriver and the actor and former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a great-granddaughter of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. Born in Los Angeles in 1989, she graduated from the University of Southern California and published her first book, "Rock What You've Got", on body image while still a student. She has since written "I Just Graduated, Now What?" and "The Gift of Forgiveness", a collection of interviews about forgiveness, as well as children's books, and she is a longtime advocate for animal rescue and adoption. She married the actor Chris Pratt in 2019.
The House of Plantagenet was the royal dynasty that ruled England for 331 years, from the accession of Henry II in 1154 to the death of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, making it the longest-reigning royal house in English history. Fourteen Plantagenet kings held the throne in unbroken succession, and in the fifteenth century the family's two junior branches, the houses of Lancaster and York, fought each other for the crown in the civil wars later known as the Wars of the Roses. ## Origins The dynasty came from Anjou in western France. Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, is said to have worn a sprig of broom, *planta genista*, in his cap, and from that nickname the family eventually took its name, although it was not used as an actual surname until Richard, 3rd Duke of York, adopted it in the 1440s. Geoffrey's marriage in 1128 to Empress Matilda, daughter and designated heir of Henry I of England, gave their son a claim to the English throne that he made good in 1154. With Normandy and Anjou behind him, and Aquitaine gained through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II ruled lands reaching from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees, the assemblage historians call the Angevin Empire. ## Notable members The early, or Angevin, kings are among the most familiar names in English history: Henry II, whose itinerant justices and sworn juries laid the foundations of the common law; Richard the Lionheart, a leading commander of the Third Crusade; and King John, who sealed Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215. Henry III rebuilt Westminster Abbey, Edward I conquered Wales and summoned the Model Parliament, and Edward III opened the Hundred Years' War and founded the Order of the Garter. Later generations produced Edward the Black Prince, the victor of Poitiers, Henry V of Agincourt, and Richard III, whose lost grave was rediscovered in Leicester in 2012. ## Lancaster and York Edward III's many sons divided the dynasty. From his third surviving son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, came Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI, and, through Gaunt's Beaufort children, Margaret Beaufort and her son Henry VII. From his fourth son, Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, combined with the senior Mortimer descent from his second son, Lionel of Antwerp, came Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and his sons Edward IV and Richard III. The rivalry of those branches produced thirty years of intermittent civil war, ending when Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at Bosworth and married Elizabeth of York, uniting the red and white roses. ## Significance No other family has shaped English institutions so deeply. Under the Plantagenets, Magna Carta became a settled principle, parliament grew from an occasional royal council into a body whose consent was needed for taxation, the common law took its enduring form, and English displaced French as the language of the court. Their castles, abbeys and cathedrals still define the medieval landscape of England and Wales. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Ruled | England, 1154 to 1485 | | Founder | Henry II, son of Geoffrey V of Anjou and Empress Matilda | | Place of origin | Anjou, France | | Kings | Fourteen, from Henry II to Richard III | | Branches | Angevin, Lancaster, York | | Emblems | The broom flower, the red rose of Lancaster, the white rose of York | | Last king | Richard III, killed at Bosworth in 1485 | | Legacy | Magna Carta, English common law, the growth of parliament |
The Vanderbilts are an American family who rose from Dutch farming stock on Staten Island to hold the largest private fortune in the United States, built by Cornelius Vanderbilt, known as the Commodore, out of nineteenth century shipping and railroads, and known today for the Gilded Age houses their descendants built and for figures from Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, to the journalist Anderson Cooper. ## Origins on Staten Island The family descends from Jan Aertsen van der Bilt, a Dutch settler who reached New Netherland in the seventeenth century and whose descendants farmed on Staten Island for generations. Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877) was born there, the son of a boatman, and began work as a teenager carrying freight across New York Harbour in a single sailing barge. He married his first cousin Sophia Johnson in 1813. ## The railroad fortune Vanderbilt moved from sail to steam, dominated the Hudson River and coastal trade, and after the Civil War turned to railroads, consolidating the New York Central system and building Grand Central Depot. He left almost the whole fortune to one son, William Henry Vanderbilt, who nearly doubled it in eight years before dividing it evenly among his own eight children. They built the family's great houses: The Breakers and Marble House at Newport, Biltmore House in North Carolina, Hyde Park on the Hudson, Florham in New Jersey and Shelburne Farms in Vermont. ## Notable members The third and fourth generations produced Consuelo Vanderbilt, who married the 9th Duke of Marlborough and became a social reformer in England; the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, who died in the sinking of the Lusitania; and Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, who won the America's Cup three times and invented contract bridge. The modern line runs through Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt to the designer Gloria Vanderbilt and her son, the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. ## Significance No American family is more closely identified with the Gilded Age. The Vanderbilts set the pattern for how new industrial wealth was spent, and then for how quickly such a fortune disperses across many heirs. What endures is institutional: Vanderbilt University, the Whitney Museum, and the houses at Newport, Hyde Park, Shelburne and Asheville that are now museums and public estates. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Founder | Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), the Commodore | | Origin | Staten Island, New York, of Dutch descent | | Source of wealth | Steamboat shipping, then the New York Central railroads | | Famous houses | The Breakers, Marble House, Biltmore House, Hyde Park | | Best known members | Consuelo Vanderbilt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Gloria Vanderbilt, Anderson Cooper | | Generations covered | Five, from the Commodore to Anderson Cooper |
The House of Bernadotte is the royal family of Sweden, founded by the French marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who was elected Swedish crown prince in 1810 and reigned from 1818 as King Charles XIV John, and it has held the throne in an unbroken line ever since, down to King Carl XVI Gustaf, Crown Princess Victoria and Princess Estelle. ## Origins The dynasty began far from Sweden, in the Gascon town of Pau, where Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte was born in 1763 as the son of a provincial lawyer. He rose through the revolutionary French army to become a Marshal of the Empire and Prince of Pontecorvo. In 1810 the Swedish Riksdag, left without an heir after the deposition of Gustav IV Adolf and the accession of the childless Charles XIII, unexpectedly offered the succession to the French marshal. He accepted, converted to Lutheranism, took the name Charles John and in 1818 became king of both Sweden and Norway. His marriage to Desiree Clary, a Marseille merchant's daughter once engaged to Napoleon, produced the dynasty's second king, Oscar I. ## Notable members Oscar I's marriage to Josephine of Leuchtenberg, a granddaughter of the Empress Josephine, brought a descent from Sweden's older royal houses into the line, and Gustaf V's marriage to Victoria of Baden, a great granddaughter of the deposed Gustav IV Adolf, reinforced it. Later generations produced an unusual number of figures known for work outside the court: Prince Eugen, one of Sweden's foremost landscape painters; Gustaf VI Adolf, a working archaeologist and botanist; and Sigvard Bernadotte, an industrial designer. The family's daughters carried the name into the other Scandinavian monarchies and into Belgium: Ingrid became queen of Denmark, Astrid queen of the Belgians and Martha crown princess of Norway, which makes this tree a close relative of the Glucksburg line. ## Significance Under the Bernadottes the Swedish monarchy moved from real political power to a purely ceremonial role, settled by the constitution of 1974. In 1980 Sweden became the first monarchy to adopt full absolute primogeniture, making the infant Crown Princess Victoria heir ahead of her younger brother. Carl XVI Gustaf, who became heir at nine months old and king in 1973, is the longest reigning monarch in Swedish history. Several princes of the house lost their royal titles by marrying commoners and were created Counts of Wisborg by the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, a kinsman through Queen Sophia of Nassau, which is why the Bernadotte name is borne today both by a reigning royal house and by a line of counts. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Family name | House of Bernadotte | | Country | Sweden, and Norway until 1905 | | Founder | Charles XIV John, born Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (1763 to 1844) | | Reigning since | 1818 | | Monarchs | Charles XIV John, Oscar I, Charles XV, Oscar II, Gustaf V, Gustaf VI Adolf, Carl XVI Gustaf | | Current head | King Carl XVI Gustaf, reigning since 1973 | | Heir apparent | Crown Princess Victoria, Duchess of Vastergotland | | Principal residences | Stockholm Palace, Drottningholm Palace, Haga Palace | | Royal motto | "For Sweden, with the times" (Carl XVI Gustaf) |
The Belgian royal family, formally the House of Belgium and dynastically a branch of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, is the reigning family of Belgium, founded when the German prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld accepted the throne of the newly independent kingdom in 1831 and continuing today through King Philippe and his heir, Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant. Belgium became independent from the Netherlands in 1830 and chose a constitutional monarchy. Its National Congress looked abroad for a sovereign who could balance French and British interests, and settled on Leopold, a widowed, well-connected and famously cautious prince who had already turned down the crown of Greece. He took the constitutional oath on 21 July 1831, still the Belgian national day. Seven monarchs have reigned since: Leopold I, Leopold II, Albert I, Leopold III, Baudouin, Albert II and Philippe. ## Origins The dynasty's roots are in the small Thuringian duchy of Saxe-Coburg, whose princes married into half the thrones of nineteenth-century Europe. Leopold I was the uncle of both Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert, and his second marriage, to Louise-Marie of Orleans, daughter of the French king Louis Philippe I, tied the new kingdom to Paris as well as London. The crown did not pass in a straight line: Leopold II's only son died at the age of nine, so the succession moved to Leopold II's brother Philippe, Count of Flanders, and then to Philippe's son, Albert I. Every Belgian monarch since 1909 descends from that collateral branch. ## Notable members Leopold II is the most studied and most criticised figure in the family, remembered for the industrial boom and monumental building of his reign and, above all, for his personal rule over the Congo Free State. Albert I and Queen Elisabeth of Bavaria became wartime symbols of Belgian resistance behind the Yser in 1914. Leopold III's surrender in 1940 and his conduct under occupation triggered the political crisis known as the Royal Question and ended in his abdication. Baudouin reigned for 42 years and presided over Congolese independence and Belgium's transformation into a federal state. Daughters of the house carried its blood outward: Charlotte became Empress Carlota of Mexico, Marie-Jose was the last Queen of Italy, and Josephine-Charlotte was Grand Duchess of Luxembourg. ## Significance In a country divided by language, the monarchy has been the one institution claimed by both Flemish and Walloon Belgians, and the king's role in brokering coalition governments remains politically real rather than ceremonial. The family has also changed with the country: equal succession was introduced in 1991, making Princess Elisabeth the first female Duchess of Brabant and the future first queen regnant of the Belgians, and in 2020 a court recognised Delphine of Saxe-Coburg as a daughter of Albert II. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Dynasty | House of Belgium (Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) | | Country | Kingdom of Belgium | | Founder | Leopold I, King of the Belgians (1790-1865) | | Reigning since | 21 July 1831 | | Monarchs to date | Seven, from Leopold I to Philippe | | Current head | King Philippe (born 1960), reigning since 2013 | | Heir apparent | Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant (born 2001) | | Principal residences | Royal Palace of Brussels, Castle of Laeken | | Motto | L'union fait la force / Eendracht maakt macht |
John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr.'s recorded parents are John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. married Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. has 1 recorded sibling: Caroline Kennedy.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. is recorded as Lawyer, journalist and magazine publisher in the Kennedy family tree.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr.'s recorded native place is Washington, D.C., United States.
8 ancestors and 0 descendants of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. are recorded so far, within a tree of 56 people.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. is recorded in the Kennedy family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 55 other people.
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