To find a place in the world where you belong outside the place where you grew up is how Cameo Wood describes returning to the home of her three-times great-grandparents in Kilchreest.

Cameo, who first landed on Irish soil eleven years ago, shortly after discovering her roots, returned this week with 30 members of her extended family to walk in the footsteps of their ancestors who left Galway in the early 1900s.

Discovering that connection, over a century after her relatives set foot on a ship bound for the USA, has led her family to discover a past they never knew they had.

“In 2011, someone associated with Ireland Reaching Out [Ireland XO] contacted me and said they had been clearing out Killinane Graveyard and said ‘we found your ancestors and if you come, we’ll show you where they lived, what they did and how they spent their time’,” says Cameo of the discovery.

“That sounded pretty good,” she laughs. “You hear that you might be Irish but what are you going to do – go to Dublin and look at a harp and then go home? That wouldn’t be very interesting.”

What was interesting was finding a long-forgotten connection with a place that extended her roots from Pittsfield, Berkshire County, Massachusetts, across the Atlantic to Kilchreest where her three-times great-grandparents, Pat Ball and Margaret Donohue, are buried.

It was their daughter, Jane Agnes Ball who married Kilkenny man George Daniels and moved to the US, beginning the journey that led 30 of their descendants back to Galway this summer.

Cameo’s awareness of her Irish roots only came about after hearing from Ireland XO – an organisation founded by Galway man Mike Feerick – while there had been rumours of a connection with the ‘old sod’, they’re not uncommon in America, she laughs.

“No one ever mentioned we were Irish. I sort of happened on a tiny link, but I was 90% sure it wasn’t true because all Americans like to think they’re Irish and Native American – and they never are!”

Now San Francisco-based, Cameo is an Emmy award-winning filmmaker but was working in tech in 2011 and it was while she was selling her company to Google that she was contacted by Mike Feerick of Ireland XO.

Standing in Woodville Gardens just outside Kilchreest, she says since that first trip to Galway in 2011, the connection has been re-established, and it’s thriving.

“We’re here in Woodville and Margarita [Donohue] who runs it remembers me. And we were just in the Village Inn in Kilchreest which I was referred to – I already had a connection.

“I can go to a bar in Loughrea and embarrassingly order my Guinness with blackcurrant syrup, because they know how I like it – and I can take 30 members of my family with me because we already know people, and that’s exciting,” says Cameo.

The complexities of Irish history at the turn of the 20th Century may have complicated matters, she says of their lost heritage, because her ancestors were Protestants and left Ireland as the push for independence intensified.

“After I made the first trip, I came back and was talking to my cousins and I was saying, ‘I think we’re definitely Irish, but it’s a weird kind of Irish because we’re Protestants’, and there were questions about if Protestants could even be Irish,” she laughs.

While many here would associate Massachusetts with the Irish-American community, Pittsfield where her family is from is a long way from the Boston-Irish, as Cameo explains.

“It’s far away from Boston and we don’t have a lot of ideas of culture there because, for whatever reason, once you’re in the Berkshires, you’re ‘Berkshires’ and wherever you came from, it doesn’t matter. And that’s true for a lot of America where there’s this funny uneasiness with heritage.

“Everyone’s American, but you forget where you came from. It may also have been the case that being an Irish person in the early 1900s wasn’t a plus, so it’s possible it fell away for that reason,” she continues.

It was as Cameo filled her relatives in on their Irish connection that the idea of a family trip grew legs.

“There’s these people at Ancestry.com who have a really big team here and they did a ton of research, and they used the research that I got from Ireland XO as part of a book they were putting together.

“I’d been involving my family and getting pictures and quotes and suddenly, everyone was like, ‘wait, we are Irish – this is amazing’!”

Ancestry help families organise this type of trip, says Cameo, and once word spread that she was planning a return, the numbers kept growing.

“At first, it was only going to be five or six people and . . . word of mouth spread that if you were a family member to Cameo, you could go to Ireland. Now we’re finally here.”

As part of their eight-day tour of the country, they took in Dublin, Galway and Clare, but their trip to Kilkenny was special. There, they met direct descendants of their two-times great-grandfather.

“We’re all very wary about claiming to be Irish because we don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, but now some of my cousins got tattoos saying they’re Irish, so we’re fully in,” she jokes.

“Thirty members of my family are going through this together and it is an experience we can communicate through the generations. We were just reading how my third-great-grandfather went to Salamanca and Rochester, New York, and then came back to Kilchreest, so we’ve always been travellers across the Atlantic and now we can continue to come back.

“I’m the organiser of the trip and my goal is to leave people feeling that this is the place they belong in the world, other than their hometown – this is their second hometown. I want them to feel like they have a local pub to go to and that they feel like they could take their children and their friends in 10 or 20 years and feel like they know the area and are comfortable here,” says Cameo.