Almost everyone has old family photos at home of some description or vintage. This one is of Margaret Keane O’Keeffe from Lisnakill, pictured shortly before her death from a ruptured appendix in August 1915.

Not yet seventeen years of age, Maggie was buried in Butlerstown cemetery and this Arthur Poole portrait was used for her memoriam card.

She had three older sisters. Their father, farmer Matthew Keane, was killed, aged 32, when he was thrown off a sidecar by a bolting mare at Paddy Brown’s Road on September 3rd, 1899. Maggie was just a few months old at the time.

She and her siblings’ future stepdad would be John O’Keeffe, Kilronan. He married widow Ellen Keane and moved to Lisnakill with his surviving children from his first marriage to Mary (née Keane, a sister of Matthew, and so his second wife’s sister-in-law) after she died of ill health in 1903. They lost several children at a young age.

Maggie’s mother, a Power from Ballinaclough, lived till she was 85. She was laid to rest in the same plot as her youngest girl, nearly three and a half decades later.