The Gaffney &
Cassidy Families

From Ancient Connacht to Cincinnati

In the 1850s, four Gaffney brothers farmed adjacent plots in Falleens, a tiny townland in south Sligo. Within a generation, the Land War, eviction, and emigration scattered them across Ireland, England, and America. Meanwhile, in nearby Charlestown, two unrelated Cassidy families — one of National Teachers, the other of tenant farmers and IRA volunteers — would each send a child across the Atlantic. Philip “Finny” and Peggy Cassidy married in Cincinnati in 1929, joining two lines that had been neighbors in the west of Ireland for centuries. This is their story, pieced together from civil records, census returns, parish registers, military archives, and newspaper clippings.