Patrick Joseph Kennedy was born on January 14, 1858, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the youngest of five children born to
Patrick Kennedy (1823–1858) and Bridget Murphy (1824–1888). His parents were Irish
Catholic immigrants who were both from
New Ross,
County Wexford and emigrated to America together to flee the
Great Famine in Ireland. The couple's elder son John had died of
cholera in infancy two years before Kennedy was born. Ten months after P. J. Kennedy's birth, his father Patrick also succumbed to the infectious
epidemic that infested the family's
East Boston neighborhood. As the only surviving male, Kennedy was the first family member to receive a formal education, attending Sacred Heart, a private Catholic school in Boston. His mother Bridget had purchased an East Boston
stationery and notions store where she had worked. The business took off and expanded into a
grocery and
liquor store. At the age of fourteen, young Kennedy left school to help support his mother and three older sisters, Mary, Joanna, and Margaret, as a
stevedore on the
Boston docks. In the 1880s, with money he had saved from his modest earnings and help from his mother Bridget, he launched a business career by buying a saloon in the
Haymarket Square neighborhood near downtown Boston. In time, he bought a second establishment by the
East Boston docks. Next, to capitalize on the
social drinking of upper-class Bostonians, Kennedy purchased a third bar in an upscale East Boston hotel, the Maverick House. Before he was 30, his growing prosperity allowed him to buy a whiskey-importing business. == Marriage and children ==