[2][6] Kennedy succeeded his father as a director of Robert Young Pickering co. in Wishaw.
[2] He was a governing director of James Kennedy and Co. Ltd., a timber importers of Glasgow.
[6] For a time, he was a director of George Outram and Co., the owners of the Glasgow Herald newspaper.
[2] His father James Kennedy took on a herd of Aberdeen Angus cattle at Doonholm.
[6] James Kennedy and Eliza Pagan had 4 daughters Alice, Gertrude, Nora and Myra; as well as sons Norman and William.
Sylvia was the younger daughter of Brigadier General Edmund George Henry Bingham (Royal Artillery) and Beatrice Helen Stephen (1861-1949) who married in 1886 in Australia.
Her mother Beatrice Helen had remarried when Bingham died in 1904, she married Hugh Palliser Hickman (1856-1930) in 1905.