The Graham Archive

Context

Creator(s): Graham family of Belfast. Keegan, Graham and Company, Wine and Spirit Merchants

• Administrative History ↴

  The Graham family were a well-off Catholic family of wine and spirit merchants in Belfast for much of the nineteenth century. They had relatives in many parts of Ireland and in England. The archives includes documents relating to the extended family including members of the Bean, Bowden, Crowley, Drake, Maguire, Murphy, McAllister and McCarney families. James Keegan (d.1882) began a wine and spirit business in Belfast in 1834. His brother Peter joined the company in 1840. The business thrived and by the late 1840s brothers James and Peter had their own distilleries. Peter left the partnership in 1851 to pursue his own business interests. James Keegan was joined in 1872, by his son John Joseph Keegan, changing the company’s name to James Keegan and Son. In 1881, James Keegan retired and Thomas Graham Junior, who worked as a bookkeeper in the company, became a partner of John Joseph Keegan, changing the company name to Keegan Graham and Company. John Joseph later became a Justice of the Peace and moved to Brooklyn, County Down in the 1870s. John Joseph Keegan died in 1892, and by 1906 his mother, Margaret Farr Keegan, decided to leave the business. After John Joseph’s death the firm continued as Keegan, Graham and Company, occupying the same premises at numbers 54 and 56 High Street, Belfast, until its destruction during air raids in 1941. It is unclear who William Agnew was, but his will is among the business papers of Keegan Graham and Company. The archive consists of legal documents, business records and correspondence of the Graham family and of Keegan, Graham and Company.

• Archival History ↴

  Deposited in Maynooth University Library in 2014 by a family friend, the collection had been in the care of the last member of the Graham family, Eileen Graham of Howth, who died in 2008.

• Immediate Source Acquisition ↴

  Donation