DR. JOHN KENNEDY, SR. b. 1702, IRELAND
Source: Bob Francis -RootsWeb WorldConnect Project <http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=johnkennedy&id=I19598>
From letters of L. V. Hagan, Jr. (q.v.) it appears that John never reached Bourbon County [KY]. [This]John, at the age of 7 or 8, and about 1710, was kidnapped from the west coast of Ireland, transported to America, and sold as a bond servant in the colony of Maryland, later becoming a doctor (see Collins' History of Kentucky, Vol. II, p. 71); Dr. Kennedy, thought to be a son of Sir Alexander Kennedy of Scotland, (but proof is lacking), moved to Frederick County, Maryland, and later probably to Bedford County, Virginia. Apparently, at the turn of the century, there was another John Kennedy (son of David) and not of subject lineage (a surveyor, 1776, age 54 in 1803) who journeyed over Wilderness Road to Bourbon County (1) to establish land of Joseph Kennedy, (2) to establish improvements on Kennedy Creek for John Kennedy (son of John), and (3) to look out for land for Joseph and Thomas Kennedy, the latter journeying with John of David, both arriving in April 1776 at Boonesborough where they met Michael Stoner, surveyor and Indian-fighter. One Edward Wilson, age about 65 in 1803, deposeth that "in 1782 he surveyed the preemption for John Kennedy, son of John." (see proceedings, Bourbon County Court, September-October, 1803). To confuse the reader further, we here take cognizance of nearby Madison County, which is proud of its historical Kennedys, many of whom bear given names identical with those in our recital; and we urge any investigator of Kentucky Kennedys to read with care a portrayal of "The Kennedys" at pp. 45-47 in Glimpses of Historical Madison County by Jonathan T. and Maud W. Dorris, 1955. Other pertinent Kennedy references are - Manuscript of Eli Kennedy (1830), presently the property of Mrs. Pattie (Ware) Rhodus, 1518 S. High Street, Paris, Kentucky; Scott's Papers, Kentucky Historical Society, 1953, p. 154; Eckenrode's Revolutionary Soldiers in Virginia, p. 173; Gwathmey's Virginians in Revolutionary War, p. 440.
--above text from John Jones/Mary Swartzwelder, p. 5.

THOMAS KENNEDY OF BOURBON COUNTY, KENTUCKY 1744 - 1827
SOURCE: "Root and Branch" website, Bob Francis - original spelling retained.
<http://www.shawhan.com/jessekennedy.html>
The Memoirs of Jesse Kennedy of Bourbon County, KY. Written by Jesse Kennedy at his home, Concord, near Paris, Ky., 1850. Jesse Kennedy’s memoirs were copied by hand by Miss Nanon L. Carr of Kansas City, Missouri, in May, 1969. Copied from the "Kennedy" file in the John Fox, Jr., Genealogical Library, located in the Duncan Tavern Historical Center, 323 High Street, Paris, KY 40361, June, 2000, by Robert E. Francis, and transcribed July, 2000.

This is a brief history of the Kennedy family as derived from my Father in his lifetime, according to the best of my recollection.

My grandfather, John Kennedy, was kidnapped on the shores of Ireland in company with several other boys when six or seven years old and brought to the colony of Maryland and sold for a term of years. After performing his term of servitude he married a wife who left him at her death two sons, Francis and Daniel Kennedy. He afterwards married a lady from Wales, by the name of Owen, by whom he had six sons and one daughter: John, Thomas, James, Butler, Joseph, Hugh and Elizabeth. ......................

My Father, Thomas Kennedy, was born in Maryland 22 [may be 7] January 1744. He was a small lean man, who in the prime of his life weighed 136 pounds and never weighed over 140 pounds. He had an excellent physical constitution, was energetic and hardy as a pine knot. His mental abilities were naturally good, though without polish, his education being very limited. He was a man of unbounded resolution and unwavering perserverence in whatever he conceived to be the path of duty. He might be led but could not be driven. He was a man of great hospitality and of strict moral integrity. He would voluntarily submit to the loss of dollars rather than wrong or to be thought to wrong others out of cents. The violent irritability of his temper was his greatest infirmity and caused him more mental agony and contrition than anything else.

He married Ann Locker in Maryland on 19 April 1772. In the fall of 1775, he went to N. C. in search of a home for himself and family. He returned without being sufficiently pleased to induce him to migrate thither. In the spring of 1776 he came to Ky. under a verbal contract with the brothers John and Joseph, to endeavor to procure land for them as well as for himself in case he should like the country well enough. They promised to remove to the country also and be his neighbors, promising to compensate him to his satisfaction out of the land which might be procured for them, or in such other manner as he might prefer. He came to Boonesborough where he fell in with Michael Stoner who invited Father to go with him and help him clear a field and plant corn. He accepted the invitation, helped him clear the ground and planted corn in what was long known as Stoner’s fiel, the land now owned by Samuel Clay, adjoining the farm of Mrs. Moran, northward and down Stoner.

On occasion he lived these months without either bread or salt. The country was full of wild game and they had a variety of fresh meats, but the buffalo furnished their principal food in the absence of which the country could not have been settled when it was. In the summer or fall of (Thomas KENNEDY, cont.)
the same year, he returned to Fauquier Co., Va., where he then lived, intending to remove his family immediately to Ky., but owing to various difficulties that interposed, principally produced by the Revolutionary War, he did not return until the fall or winter of 1779 with his family. He was a brick mason and carpenter, could do rough stone work also and was a plasterer. He started to Ky. with a train of pack horses well loaded with household and kitchen furniture and such tools as belonged to his business, expecting to have use for them in Ky.. Owing to the difficulties in traversing the great extent of wilderness country that lay before him without a road and without forage, his horses tired and gave out one after another, causing him to hide his his plunder in the woods at different places until he was dispossessed of almost everything and ultimately got to Boonesborough in December 1779 with but a little mare and a bull, upon which he packed a bed after his other animals had given out. He then had three sons and a daughter, and being reduced to extremities, he made two baskets out of white oak splints, in each of which he placed one of his boys (Jacky and James) connecting the baskets with hickory bark or buffalo twigs, swinging one of them on each side of the little mare, and placed Thomas, then about 6 or 7 years old, on top. Father walked and carried Nancy on his back, she being born the January preceding. His wife walked also and carried such articles of clothing as she could. He never went
back to recover any of his plunder deposited in the wilderness. Owing the great lapse of time before circumstances would permit him to do so, he could not expect to find them. After remaining a short time at Boonesborough, they joined a company (Capt. John Strode at their head) and helped build Strode’s Station, where he resided for four or five years.

Somewhere in their journey to Ky., the nag fell down and broke the rider’s (Thomas) leg, not hurting the other children. They bandaged it as well they could, put him up again and pursued their journey without the loss of much time. The winter of 1779-80 was unusually severe, so cold that the cane in the country upon which the buffalo wintered was mostly killed which caused many of them to die, causing much suffering among the emigrants for buffalo meat was their reliance for sustenance.

Sometime in the spring of 1780, Father’s wife died leaving him with four children, one of whom (Jacky) died the same year.

Thomas Kennedy procured a settlement and preemption of land for himself and two brothers each. He located his own on Strode’s Creek and his brother’s on Kennedy’s Creek. He would have located his own on this Creek also had there been room enough for all of them without clashing with others who wanted some of the Kennedy’s Creek land also; he gave the preference to his brothers concluding that as they would pay him in land for his services (about two hundred acres each) that would be as much as he would settle his children on Strode’s Creek when they should want it. He selected the place on which I now reside for his own residence. Sometime after these locations were made, uncle John Kennedy came to the country and being delighted with the location made for him, as well as the country generally, he employed Capt. James Duncan to clear his land out of the office which was to have 600 acres out of the claims. Capt. Duncan took in Michael Couchman as a partner and in this way they became the owners of 300 acres each of the land in John Kennedy’s survey on Kennedy’s Creek, which at their deaths descended to their heirs. Capt. Duncan also undertook to clear Father’s land on Strode’s Creek out of the office on the same terms; but finding that other claims would clash with it, he became discouraged, told Father that he (Duncan) must return to his family in Va. and that if he should think proper to have the survey made to call on his friend Edward Wilson, a surveyor, and they would hereafter settle upon equitable terms…Duncan removed the family from Berkeley Co., Va., to Strode’s Station and he and Father resided there until they settled on Kennedy’s Creek on 1 February 1785, where they continued to exercise toward cash other all the friendly relations of neighborship until separated by death. Duncan died Oct. 1817 and Kennedy, August 1827.

[NLC Transcriber’s Note: There follows a lengthy harangue about the 12 years of litigation over land between Thomas Kennedy and James Duncan. Either Thomas or Jesse Kennedy or both seem to have had persecution complexes as shown by the accounts of what Thomas’s brs. John’s family did to him.]

Father also became involved in lawsuits with Sam Hatcher who had migrated to the country and resided with his family in my Father’s house, receiving gratuitous support during the greater part of one winter and was furnished with bread and meat for his family through the spring and summer, for which Hatcher promised to pay but ultimately paid not a dime for any but what was proved and forced from him by law, which probably was not more than half of the amount received, this augmenting the necessity on the part of Father for selling more land—but the most unkind cut of all has not yet been told.

After the widow and heirs of uncle John Kennedy migrated to Ky. and received and enjoyed the kind aid and fostering care of Father until they became able to live without his further beneficience, they then demanded and brought suit for the 200 acres of land upon which he was living and which he had expected to retain as a reasonable compensation for services rendered in procuring land for his brother under a contract previously made with him. The suit was vigorously prosecuted and vigorously defended, and notwithstanding he proved his contract and satisfactorily by his brother Joseph Kennedy and Thomas Logwood, executor of John Kennedy’s will, it being a verbal contract of more than five years standing, he was defeated by the statute of limitations and thus cut off from every particle of compensation for the hazardous toil endured by him in procuring all the lands which they were permitted by other claims to hold in the country.

This was the most distressing and heartrending contest that he had because it was with those from whom he had a right to expect kinder treatment, who owed him a debt of gratitude as well as of land. The descendants of a brother that he loved most dearly and in whom he had the most unbounded confidence, a debt which would have been punctually discharged had his brother lived long enough to consumate it. The conduct of the widow and heirs amounted to the very quintessence of ingratitude. Most of the heirs, however, were sufficiently magnimonous to permit him to retain the land by paying its value and money and other lands, and thus he retained about 150 acres, his pecuniary condition not enabling him to retain more.

It was the wish of Sam Hatcher to exterminate him, but in this he was failed. I have often heard Father say that it had been a fixed and determinate purpose with him to live and die on Kennedy’s Creek from the time he located on it, if consistent with the will of God.

[More litigation and defending titles to lands Kennedy had sold—had to pay Isaac Davis of Virginia nearly $2000—had to borrow from friends to save the 150 acres.]

JESSE KENNEDY, b. 1787, BOURBON COUNTY, KENTUCKY
SOURCE: Source: . Bev Harris <bharris@sbuniv.edu>
Newspaper death notice from [prob] The Western Citizen, Bourbon County, KY. April [?], 1863

On Friday night, April 3rd [1863], at nine o'clock, at Concord, his late residence, on the Winchester Pike, Mr. Jesse Kennedy, in the 76th year of his age, one of the most honored and respected citizens of Bourbon County. Mr. Kennedy at the time of his death was probably the oldest native-born citizen who resided in the county.

A son of an early pioneer, he was born the 11th of August 1787, on Kennedy's Creek in Bourbon County, on the same farm and within a hundred yards of the place where he closed his mortal career--having resided there all the days of his life. The farm was settled in 1785 by his father, Thomas Kennedy, who redeemed it from a wilderness, and transmitted his name to the stream which ripples through it, after he had lived several years in the fort at Boonesboro, had assisted Capt. Strode in building Strode's Station, and had with Michael Stoner cleared and planted "Stoner's Field," noted in the early annals of Kentucky. About the same time, came Capt. Duncan and Michel Couchman, and soon after the Clays--all of whom, though long since passed away, have left honored names and generations still living in the neighborhood who will keenly sympathize with the relations and friends of him whose recent death many deplore because of his excellence as a man and his usefulness as a citizen, before age and afflication had laid an embargo on his powers. In early life--like most others of that period--he enjoyed but few facilities for education or mental improvement. Possessed however of a superior natural mind, by close application and a strict fidelity to truth and honor he rose to a position of prominence in the estimation of his fellowmen. In 1812, he was a commander of a brigade of pack horses in the service of the country in the war with Great Britian. No officer of his rank gave more attention to the duties of the position, or rendered greater satisfaction. In 1813, he was appointed a constable of Bourbon County, which office he filled with success and acceptability of nearly six years--when, as stated by himself in a private memoir, he resigned "because times were getting hard in a pecuniary point of view, and consequently required a degree of rigor in the collection of debts that was in divers instances revolting to my feelings." As early as 1819, and for a number of years thereafter, he was an occasional contributor to the columns of the Western Citizen upon the leading political topics of the day. His articles were all characterized by a vigor of thought and lucidness of expression which rendered them attractive to the readers!

For many years, he was a justice of the peace for the county--under the old Constitution--the duties of which he discharged with a fidelity and intelligence that conferred honor and dignity upon the office. In 1829, he was elected one of the representatives of Bourbon County in the Legislature of Kentucky, along with Hubbard Taylor, Esq. and Maj. G. W. Williams. At that time the sessions were annual, and Bourbon had three representatives. In 1831, he was again elected--and again in 1832 and 1841, after which he declined all solicitation to fill public office. During this period of his active life, perhaps no citizen of Bourbon County commanded more fully the confidence of its people, or held that confidence in more sacred trust. As a member of the legislature, he served in its councils during the brightest period of Kentucky history. Menifee, Marshall, Speed Smith, Hardin, Crittenden, the Sickliffes, Moreheads, and other distinguished names gave tone and dignity to its deliberations; while the shafts of wit, the magic of oratory, and the profundity of logic were so sublinely illustrated as to give to Kentucky statesmanship imperishable renown. It was the epoch of pride and glory in our Commonwealth; and a seat in its councils then was an honor which the degeneracies of time cannot efface. Mr. Kennedy was no orator and rarely, if ever, entered the lists of public debate; yet in the midst of this charmed circle of powerful men, wielding only his remarkable common sense, repudiating all hypocracy and adhering always to truth--following the impulses of honor, and convictions of duty--he was enabled to exercise an influence little inferior to any member of those justly celebrated assemblies. At a later period of life, he embraced the doctrine of the "Universal Salvation of Christ" for all men. His confident trust was in the goodness, the mercy, and infinite love of God to purify the earth from sin, "to wipe away the tears from all eyes," and to cause "every knee to bow, and every tongue to confess him Lord to the glory of God the Father." With unshaken firmness he believed in the eventual holiness and happiness of all the human race, as revealed to the world in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, and this happy conviction disrobed death of its terrors, and made smooth his pathway to the tomb. Long an invalid and often an acute sufferer from disease, he bore his afflictions with patient and Christian resignation, many times expressing his willingness and even earnest desire to be released from his sufferings and go to his eternal rest, "Tis done!”

Calmly and peacefully, "after life's fitful fever is over he sleeps well." A kind neighbor, an affectionate father, a steadfast friend, a good citizen, a patriot, a Christian --and above all the noblest work of God, "an honest man," rests in his grave. A numerous family of children mourn his loss and revere his memory. Not far hence, and they too will be "snatched from this dreary abode, and all laid to rest in the arms of their God."