American visitors’ emotional trip to grave of their long-gone Galway ancestors
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.
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