Long before Ethel Kennedy became a matriarch to one the most powerful political dynasties in American history she was a little girl who grew up in Connecticut.
The world knew Ethel Skakel Kennedy as the wife of U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and sister-in-law of President John F. Kennedy, but her own story started on April 11, 1928, when Ethel Skakel was born in Chicago, Illinois. By the time she was 5, the family moved east, eventually settling in Greenwich.
Her biography, which is posted on the website of the John F. Kennedy Library, some key aspects of her life.
Ethel was the daughter of George Skakel and Ann Brannack Skakel.
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While George Skakel started out as a railroad clerk making $8 a week, he and some co-workers built a business that eventually became Great Lakes Carbon Corporation and the family became extremely wealthy, the biography says. .
In 1936, George Skakel bought a three-story, 31-room house on Lake Avenue in Greenwich.
During her early years in Connecticut, Ethel attended the all-girls Greenwich Academy in Greenwich.
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In September 1945, Ethel went to Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart and that was the beginning of her connection to the Kennedy family.
That is where she met Jean Kennedy and the two became friends and roommates.
That was also the year when Ethel met Jean's brother, Robert F. Kennedy, during a skiing trip in Quebec, Canada.
According to her biography, Bobby Kennedy was dating Ethel's sister, Patricia Skakel, at the time, but that relationship eventually ended and Robert and Ethel started seeing each other.
The couple married on June 17, 1950, at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Greenwich.
Ethel devoted much of her life to a human rights organization she helped found in her husband's name and her life was marked as much by tragedy as by achievement.
Her brother-in-law, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963, while her husband was serving as his attorney general.
Robert F. Kennedy was later elected to the U.S. Senate in New York before embarking on his own presidential campaign. While seeking the Democratic nomination, he was also killed by an assassin in June 1968.
Ethel and Robert Kennedy had 11 children and the couple's youngest daughter, Rory Kennedy, was born after her father's death.
Ethel Kennedy lost one son, David, to a drug overdose in 1985.
Twelve years later, another son, Michael, died in a skiing accident.
In 1999, nephew John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, were killed in a plane crash off the coast of Martha's Vineyard.
Granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy Hill died in 2019 at the age of 22 after a drug overdose at the Kennedy Compound.
Another nephew, Michael Skakel, was convicted in 2002 of the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Connecticut, but his conviction was overturned in 2013 and he was released on bail. In 2020, prosecutors said he would not be retried.
Ethel Kennedy passed away on Thursday at the age of 96.
She had been hospitalized after suffering a stroke last week, her family said.
