Four lives lost. Six children left behind.

In the spring of 1921, Francis Timothy Kennedy Jr., his wife Olga and their children were living in Hillside, New Jersey. Francis had worked as an agent and in real estate. Their household, with children ranging from infancy to adolescence, belonged to the extended Kennedy family into which Evelyn would be born three years later.

The Wednesday afternoon accident

On April 20, 1921, the Kennedy family's automobile was struck by a Pennsylvania Railroad train at a crossing near Roebling, in the Bordentown area. The newspaper described the crossing as a dangerous place and reported that the family was returning from a trip. Francis, forty-nine, and Olga, thirty-five, died, as did their son Edward, about six, and daughter Anita, eighteen months old.

The report also describes survivors in the automobile: their son Arnold was hurt, as was a young nephew named Charles Kennedy. Both were taken for treatment in Trenton. The newspaper reports Arnold's injuries as serious and gives a contemporaneous assessment of his condition; later family records show he survived. We should not assume any lasting injury or disability without further evidence.

The collision, the deaths and the survivors are supported both by the contemporary newspaper report and by the Ancestry timelines attached to Francis and his surviving daughter Lillian. The precise mechanics of the accident remain those of a shaken contemporary account, not a modern reconstruction of the crossing.

What Lillian escaped

Four-year-old Lillian Mildred Kennedy was not in the automobile. According to the newspaper, the family had left her at an uncle's home shortly before the accident. It was an ordinary decision that became the difference between her life and the deaths of her parents, brother and baby sister.

Four older children—Francis Charles, Leon Herbert, Marion Olga and Edna—were at home or at school, and the newspaper says they learned of the disaster on returning from school. Along with Arnold and Lillian, six Kennedy children survived.

These are their names, not a speculation about what the surviving children felt. A newspaper can document their losses; it cannot tell us how each child later understood them.

Nine years later: the household in Hillside

The 1930 federal census supplies the extraordinary second half of this history. It lists Herbert Kennedy, then about twenty, as the head of a Hillside household. His siblings Marion, Edna, Arnold and Lillian lived with him. The family had endured the disaster, and the surviving younger siblings were still together.

The same census lists Lena Wullschleger, a Germany-born widow of about seventy-two, as a guest, along with a younger relative. Her presence suggests another connection around the household but does not prove that she was Olga's sister, a legal guardian or the person who raised the children. That relationship remains an open genealogical question.

The oldest brother, Francis Charles, does not appear in the sibling household on that particular census page; absence there does not mean he was absent from their lives. Nor does the census tell us when or why the younger children chose to live together.

Lillian's long life

The later records for Lillian are a reminder that the afternoon in 1921 was only the beginning of her biography. Born in Hillside on October 26, 1916, she married George Baptiste Witt Jr. in New Jersey in 1941. She raised a family, later lived in Minnesota, and died in November 2006 at ninety.

Her timeline spans almost another century after her parents died. It turns the narrative from one disastrous event toward the lives that continued beyond it.

The connection to Evelyn

Francis was the older brother of Charles Frederick Kennedy, the dairy farmer who became Evelyn's father. Francis's parents were Francis Timothy Kennedy Sr. and Mary Ann Keeler. When Evelyn was born in July 1924, the accident was already three years in the family's past. The surviving Kennedy children were her first cousins.

Because of those relationships, this story belongs in Evelyn's wider family history—not as an event she personally witnessed, but as a tragedy that had reshaped her paternal family before her birth. The most lasting evidence may be the 1930 census: the five youngest surviving siblings appearing together under one roof.