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Requiem Mass for JFK’s Grandmother

Aug. 11, 1964 - About 1,200 persons attended a solemn requiem mass in Boston today for Mrs. Josephine Mary Hannon Fitzgerald, maternal grandmother of President Kennedy.

Mrs. Fitzgerald, the widow of John F. Fitzgerald, a former Mayor of Boston, died Saturday at the age of 98. Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York, presided at the mass in St. Brendan’s Church in Boston’s Dorchester District.

The Kennedy family, its ranks thinned by illness, was represented by Attorney General and Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy and by the Attorney General’s sister, Mrs. Sargent Shriver.

Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy, one of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s three surviving children, is in Europe and was advised by physicians not to travel home for the funeral. Her husband, still afflicted by the after-effects of a stroke he suffered in 1961, remained at his home in Hyannis Port.

Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy is in Italy. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a grandson, is in New England Baptist Hospital in Boston recovering from a broken back he suffered in a plane crash.

Richard Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston and a close friend of the Kennedy family, sent a message of condolence. He is visiting missions in Latin America.

Burial was in St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Boston’s West Roxbury section.


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