John "Jack" Kennedy was born in Greenock of Irish parents in 1870, his father a Quay Labourer so working on the docks. But the family did not stay long. His younger sister was born in 1872 and in Shotts in Lanarkshire. There their father found work first as an Iron and then as a Coal Miner and a large family was raised and mainly stayed around neighbouring Stane, including, later in life, Jack himself.

So Jack's football, he an inside-right, and that of his younger brother, James, who also played at a decent level, was learned in that corner of North Lanarkshire, where both too first went down the pit. However, at junior level Jack at nineteen first played for Bathgate Rovers and then Broxburn Shamrock. That is until 1893, when, having by then found himself as a result representing West Lothian at county level, with the reformation of Hibernian, he at the age of twenty-three and further eastward still, recruited to the Edinburgh club for five seasons, seeing them up into the top-flight in 1895, into third, second and third place of it for the remainder of his stay to 1898 and on his own account a single Scotland cap in 1897.

By then he was about to marry local girl, Mary McShane, and they would soon start a family. Indeed, as the family increased, they would have five children, she would remain in their home-town as he played his football in England, for, from the age of twenty-eight, two seasons at Stoke, saving it from relegation, and then at Glossop in the Second Division. That was before returning home, by then aged thirty-two, and four more campaigns locally and outwith the league with Bathgate once more and then Dykehead. 

And then it was back to coal mining until retirement, after 1919 as a widower. Mary would die at the age of just forty-seven to be buried in the local Stane Cemetery, where there are several members of both her and his families. And Jack would join her on his passing in 1940 at the age of seventy.