Public Biography
Marvin Hennessey is a third-generation commercial groundfisherman based in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He has held a federal limited-access scallop permit out of the port since 1989, when he inherited the family business from his father, Daniel Hennessey, who inherited it from his father, Owen Hennessey, who arrived in New Bedford in 1937 and bought his first vessel with money loaned by a parish priest. The Hennessey family has continuously operated a single-vessel scallop and groundfish business out of New Bedford for 88 years, a fact Mr. Hennessey describes as “a long time, but not the longest.”
Mr. Hennessey, 68, operates the Eleanor Mae, an 84-foot steel-hulled scallop dragger built in 1971 at a shipyard in Bath, Maine. He has fished the boat continuously since 1989 with crews of varying composition, and he has, by his own count, replaced “every part of it except the keel and the registration.”
He is a member of the Fishermen’s Pension Trust, the Fairhaven-New Bedford Fishermen’s Memorial Society, and the parish council at St. Anthony of Padua, where he has served as treasurer for nineteen years.
Mr. Hennessey’s adult son, Cole Hennessey, died on April 21, 2026, of what the Bristol County medical examiner classified as a rapid-onset cranial pressure event sustained while reading the Wikipedia entry on the Jones Act.