Kennelly married Howard Scott Gibbs, a friend from Albany, in 1935; they divorced in January 1940, and in October of that year she married Egon V. Ullman, an ENT physician who had emigrated from Vienna, Austria. During the war years, Kennelly accompanied her husband, who enlisted as a medical officer in the U.S. Air Force, to his postings in Salt Lake City and several East Coast cities. She was widowed in 1962. Except for brief periods spent in New York City (1963–64) and a farmhouse near Monmouth, Oregon (1969–72), she lived for 40 years in downtown Portland. There she held occasional salons and hosted diverse gatherings of selected guests.