Origins and Migration

The Kennedys were a Scots family who went first to Ireland and then to North America. The most probable account of their migration—though it contains a romantic element—is that given by Eliza Smith Brown in She Devils at the Door:

“For the Kennedy family, the initial foray from Ulster to Pennsylvania had been made by Bailey Kennedy in 1752. Born in 1730, Bailey had worked as a coachman on the estate of Samuel Stewart and his wife Mary.... The two twenty-two-year-olds fell in love, a decidedly unfavorable match for the daughter of a noble family. Seeking to squelch the romance, the Stuarts put Moor ‘in confinement’... When Bailey learned of their plans, he secreted Moor away in the night and galloped with her on his horse to a nearby seaport, where his possessions were waiting in a large trunk, and they boarded a ship for America. By the time the family learned of the plan and rushed to the harbor the next morning, the ship was disappearing on the horizon, and by the time they landed in Philadelphia, the runaways were married.” (She Devils at the Door, p. 24)

Early Settlement and Industrial Expansion

The Kennedys moved westward to Ohio—then part of the Connecticut Western Reserve—and later to Pittsburgh. They became significant in the development of the iron and steel industries of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, and indeed of the modern industrial world. To this day, many descendants of Julian Kennedy are engineers.

In contrast to the more flamboyant New York families connected to the Lawrences, the Kennedys were sober, practical, and rooted in the disciplines of farming, engineering, and law. Their lives reflected a habit of order and restraint. They were generally long-lived, seldom divorced, and occasionally ventured into politics, almost always as Republicans.

Scots Virtues: Thrift, Order, and Discipline

The Kennedys exhibited the traditional Scots virtues of thrift, discipline, and efficiency. Julian Kennedy exemplified these traits, seeking to maximize the output of furnaces while minimizing raw materials and energy.

His daughters inherited this zeal, waging decades-long battles against governmental waste and, at times, against their brothers over inheritance. In the Kennedy Estate Controversy, for example, the sisters successfully leveraged the legal doctrine of estoppel by acquiescence—insisting that adherence to legal and financial fact (tax filings) superseded any subjective, informal family understanding.

Julian Kennedy and his descendants represented a now-vanished American type: energetic, ethical, and confident Mainline Protestants who believed that competence, moral order, and civic virtue could build a just society.

Religious Evolution and Public Morality

Though Presbyterian in youth, Julian later joined the First Unitarian Church, where he and his wife supported what was then called “Liberal Religion.” The term meant non-dogmatic, not permissive: a faith grounded in reason and duty. Their morality was non-denominational but traditional, shaped by a belief in service and integrity.

The Kennedys supported women’s suffrage both from fairness and from conviction that women’s votes would oppose social evils—war, drunkenness, prostitution—that undermined family life. Reformers like Lucy Kennedy saw firsthand how legislators resisted raising the age of consent. Outraged by such moral blindness, Lucy denounced the Pittsburgh mayoral candidate Babcock for defending prostitution, and confronted the Episcopal bishop who refused to withdraw his endorsement of him. Both in England and America, the nineteenth century saw the gradual criminalization of “characteristically male vices,” and the Kennedys were part of this movement, insisting that public life should reflect private virtue.

Engineering Genius Applied to Civic Life

Julian Kennedy’s engineering genius lay in his ability to visualize the entire system of iron and steel production—how each machine interacted with the next—and to design for maximum yield with minimum waste. His daughters Lucy and Eliza applied this same principle to civic life: a government or business should produce the greatest good with the least cost. To that end, they studied the mechanics of politics from the ballot box through the labyrinth of municipal bureaucracy.

For the Kennedys, efficiency was never merely mechanical; it was moral. Competence, they believed, was the foundation of justice. They organized women to attend rape trials, ensuring that victims would see sympathetic faces in the courtroom. Their activism arose from conviction that competence and compassion were inseparable.

Civic Reform in Pittsburgh

The Kennedy sisters were particularly alarmed by the consequences of governmental incompetence. During the early 1950s, after a series of brutal murders of women and girls, police officers (often political appointees without training) responded hours late to calls. In one case they overlooked the victim’s body on a nearby lawn.

Lucy and Eliza Kennedy led campaigns for reform—calling for professionalized police forces, merit-based hiring, and modern investigative infrastructure. Their efforts helped lay the groundwork for later reforms in Pittsburgh’s civic administration.

Kinship and Legacy

The Kennedy and Lawrence families were joined by the marriage of Kennedy Smith (1922–1996) to Mary Elizabeth Rutter (1920–2003), a descendant of William Lawrence (1622–1680). Through this union, the industrious moralism of the Kennedys blended with the cosmopolitan energy of the Lawrences, linking two of the most distinctive traditions in American family history.