Rosemary Forbes Kerry

Who was Rosemary Forbes Kerry?

Rosemary Isabel Forbes was a nurse, social activist, and the mother of John Forbes Kerry, the 2004 candidate for President of the United States.

She was one of eleven children of James Grant Forbes of the Protestant Forbes family and Margaret Tyndal Winthrop of the Dudley–Winthrop family. She studied to be a nurse, and served in the Red Cross in Paris during World War II. She also was a Girl Scout leader at the troop and council level in Groton, Massachusetts, for 50 years. Margaret was a granddaughter of Robert Charles Winthrop.

She married Richard John Kerry, in Montgomery, Alabama on February 8, 1941, and was the mother of John Forbes Kerry, the 2004 candidate for President of the United States. They met when Kerry took a sculpture class at the resort of Saint-Briac, where the Forbes family built the family estate.

During her lifetime, she was the beneficiary of Forbes family trusts, which her son John Kerry is now the partial beneficiary; as Rosemary was one of 11 children, there is not much that remained.

Rosemary was also the mother of another son, Cameron, who is General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Commerce, and was formerly a Boston lawyer, an adjunct law professor at Suffolk Law School and a convert to Judaism; and two daughters, Diana and Margaret.