The Genealogy Trip: Tracing Our Roots in Latvia, Sicily, and Scotland

Why Three Countries? The Fractured Lineage

Our family tree wasn’t planted in one soil—it was scattered. Great-grandfather Jānis Ozoliņš left Liepāja, Latvia, aboard the SS Latvija in 1906 bound for New York; his sister Rosa followed in 1912 but disembarked in Palermo after marrying a Sicilian fisherman named Vincenzo Lo Cascio; their cousin Ewan MacLeod emigrated from Portree, Isle of Skye, to Glasgow in 1923 before crossing the Atlantic. For decades, oral history blurred these paths into a single ‘European’ origin story—until DNA testing revealed 32% Baltic, 28% Southern Italian, and 24% North Atlantic ancestry. This trip wasn’t symbolic: it was forensic. Over 37 days, we visited 11 archives, walked 217 kilometers on ancestral land, and transcribed 43 primary-source documents—from Latvian Lutheran baptismal books in Vecpilsēta to Sicilian Catholic death registers in Serradifalco, and Scottish kirk session minutes in Dunvegan Castle’s library.

Riga: Unearthing Names Beneath Soviet Erasure

We began at the Latvian State Historical Archives (LVVA) on Kr. Barona iela 15 in Riga—a Brutalist concrete complex housing 140 linear kilometers of records. Entry required advance registration via arhivs.lv, submission of a notarized letter of intent, and presentation of passports with at least six months validity. Staff archivist Inga Liepiņa guided us to Fond 1527: the Liepāja City Council Registers (1845–1940). There, beneath fluorescent lights calibrated to 500 lux to prevent document degradation, we located Jānis Ozoliņš’s 1889 birth record—written in Gothic German script, signed by Pastor Johann Dombrowski of St. Anne’s Lutheran Church. His father, Pēteris Ozoliņš, was listed as a cooper earning 12 rubles monthly at the Liepāja Shipyard (operated by Baltische Werft AG until 1918).

The archive’s digitization project—funded by the European Regional Development Fund—has made 6.2 million pages searchable online, but only 38% of pre-1920 parish registers are OCR-processed. We manually cross-referenced microfilm reels #L-1984 through #L-1991. One critical find: Rosa’s 1910 confirmation certificate, bearing her mother’s maiden name—Kalniņa—which later appeared in Palermo marriage documents. Without this link, our Sicilian trail would have ended at Ellis Island manifests.

Practical Notes from Riga

• Opening hours: Mon–Fri, 9:00–17:00; no weekend access
• Photography permitted only with prior written permission (fee: €15 per day)
• Microfilm reader reservation mandatory—booked 11 days ahead via email to lvva@arhivs.lv
• Nearest café with Wi-Fi and power outlets: Kafijas Kaste, 300m east on Elizabetes iela

Liepāja: Walking the Cobblestones of Departure

From Riga, we took the 2h 18m train (VR Class EG 3000, departure 07:42, arrival 10:00) to Liepāja. At the port, GPS coordinates 56.5072° N, 21.0114° E marked the former Ostsee-Kai pier where Jānis boarded. Today, it’s a windswept promenade lined with bronze plaques listing emigrant ships—including the SS Latvija, which carried 1,247 passengers between 1904 and 1913. We visited the Liepāja Museum’s Emigration Exhibit, where curator Aigars Zariņš shared passenger manifests digitized from Hamburg’s Adler & Co. shipping ledgers. Jānis’s ticket (No. 7832-B) cost 42 German marks—equivalent to 2.7 months’ wages for a skilled laborer in 1906.

His childhood home stood at Skolas iela 12—a yellow wooden house with a zinc roof, now repainted teal and occupied by a graphic designer. The original 1902 cadastral map (reproduced in the museum’s Zemesgrāmata collection) confirmed lot number 37/4 matched property tax rolls naming Pēteris Ozoliņš as owner. No plaque marks the site, but we placed a small stone inscribed with his birth year—following Latvian tradition of akmens novietošana (stone placement) to honor memory.

Sicily: The Olive Grove Ledger

Palermo’s Archivio Diocesano recorded our arrival with polite skepticism. Canon Don Giuseppe Mazzara, keeper of the diocese’s 800-year-old registry, required notarized proof of descent—provided via certified copies of Jānis’s U.S. naturalization papers (filed in Brooklyn, 1915, Certificate No. 2449127) and Rosa’s 1912 ship manifest showing her destination as “Palermo, Italy.” After verification, he granted access to the Registro dei Matrimoni for Serradifalco, a hilltop town 132km southeast of Palermo. We traveled by Trenitalia Regionale train (€11.40, 2h 23m) to Agrigento, then rented a Fiat Panda (€42/day, insured through Europcar Palermo Airport) for the final 48km of winding山路.

Serradifalco’s Chiesa Madre di San Giovanni Battista holds 17th-century registers bound in goatskin. Rosa’s 1913 marriage entry (folio 87, volume Matrimoni 1911–1915) listed her as “Rosa Ozolīna, nata in Libava, Lettonia,” confirming her Latvian origin—and crucially, noting her father’s name as “Pietro Ozolino” (Italianized spelling), with witness signatures including “Antonio Lo Cascio,” Vincenzo’s father. This explained why earlier searches under “Ozoliņš” failed: Italian civil registrars transliterated Baltic names phonetically, dropping diacritics and adapting endings.

Decoding Sicilian Records

1. Language shift: Latin until 1861; Italian thereafter—but surnames retained regional variants (e.g., “Lo Cascio” appears as “Locascio” in 1920 census)
2. Date format: Day-month-year, with feast-day references (“Vigilia di San Giuseppe” = March 18)
3. Witness requirements: Two male relatives or neighbors; occupations often noted (e.g., “pastore,” “pescatore”)

We spent three days at the Comune di Serradifalco’s Anagrafe office, reviewing the Stato Civile (civil registry) for 1910–1930. Rosa’s 1921 death certificate (No. 147/1921) cited tuberculosis—consistent with U.S. immigration medical exams that flagged her brother Jānis for “incipient TB” in 1906, though he passed quarantine after 17 days at Ellis Island’s Isolation Hospital. Her son Giovanni’s 1925 birth record confirmed lineage continuity: “figlio di Vincenzo Lo Cascio e Rosa Ozolīna.”

The Isle of Skye: Where Gaelic Meets Norse

Scotland’s leg was the most physically demanding: a 12-hour transit from Palermo to Portree via Rome Fiumicino, London Heathrow (BA flight BA538, 1h 42m), and Inverness (Loganair flight LM312, 45min), followed by a 45-minute drive north. Portree’s population is 2,200; its sole genealogical resource is the Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre in the old Portree Sheriff Court building (1907). Archivist Morag MacLeod—no relation, she clarified—explained that Highland records are fragmented: many parish registers were lost during the Jacobite uprisings or damaged by damp in unheated kirks. But the Dunvegan Castle Muniments, housed 22km west in a climate-controlled vault, contain 14th-century charters referencing MacLeods of Raasay.

Ewan MacLeod’s 1923 Glasgow employment record (found at the Mitchell Library) listed his trade as “stonemason, specializing in dry-stone walling”—a skill still taught at the Isle of Skye College’s Construction Skills Centre. We visited Raasay House, where estate manager Iain MacAskill showed us the 1841 census return for Raasay (HO/107/1018/1): Ewan’s grandfather, Donald MacLeod, aged 63, listed as “croft tenant, 1 acre arable + 3 acres pasture.” The same document noted Donald’s wife, Màiri, could neither read nor write—yet her signature (an X beside “Màiri MacLeod”) appeared on the 1872 Crofters Holdings Act petition.

At the ruined Teampull na Trionaid (Trinity Church) near Carbost, GPS coordinates 57.2821° N, 6.2152° W, we found Ewan’s great-uncle’s 1898 gravestone—carved in Gaelic and English: “An t-Òranach, Dòmhnull MacLeòid, 1832–1898.” The inscription included his father’s name, “Iain,” confirming the patronymic line. Local historian Finlay MacInnes provided a hand-drawn map of croft boundaries, scaled 1:2,500, showing Lot 7B—the exact plot Ewan worked before emigrating.

Archival Realities: What Didn’t Make the Brochures

No travel blog mentions the humidity damage in Palermo’s basement archives: mold spores forced us to wear N95 masks while handling 1920s birth registers. Nor do they warn that Riga’s microfilm readers require proprietary software (ArhivsReader v3.2.1) incompatible with macOS Monterey—necessitating a borrowed Windows laptop. In Skye, the archive’s photocopier broke twice; staff manually scanned 12 pages on a Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1500, charging €0.12 per page. These aren’t anecdotes—they’re operational constraints affecting research viability.

Language barriers proved more persistent than expected. In Serradifalco, the town clerk spoke only Sicilian dialect—not standard Italian—and required translation via WhatsApp voice notes sent to a linguist friend in Catania. In Riga, archival instructions are published exclusively in Latvian; Google Translate misrendered “kroņa zeme” (crown land) as “crown earth,” delaying our land-title search by two days. We learned to carry printed phrase sheets: “Vai šajā grāmatā ir ieraksts par [name]?” (Latvian), “C’è un atto di matrimonio per [name] nel registro del 1913?” (Italian), “Is there a baptismal record for [name] in the 1889 kirk session book?” (English/Gaelic hybrid).

The emotional toll was equally real. Transcribing Rosa’s death certificate—“causa: tisi” (tuberculosis)—while sitting in her grandson’s olive grove near Serradifalco’s Contrada Torretta, we counted 377 trees, each representing a year since her death. In Portree, holding Ewan’s 1923 emigration permit (issued by the Board of Trade, Ref. EM/23/8871), we noted his declared destination: “Montreal, Canada.” He never went. Instead, he boarded the SS Metagama for New York—proven by a boarding pass stub found in a leather wallet donated to the National Museum of Scotland in 2018 (Accession No. 2018.12.17).

Data Cross-Verification: When Sources Contradict

Genealogy isn’t about finding one truth—it’s about reconciling contradictions. Jānis’s 1915 U.S. naturalization affidavit claimed he arrived in “1905,” but the SS Latvija manifest confirms October 12, 1906. Rosa’s Palermo marriage record lists her birth year as 1891, yet her Liepāja confirmation certificate states 1890. Ewan’s Glasgow employment record cites “born Portree, 1898,” but the Skye 1891 census shows him as age 3 in Raasay—placing his birth in 1888.

We resolved discrepancies using primary-source hierarchy: ship manifests > civil registrations > church records > census > affidavits. The SS Latvija manifest carries highest weight—it was created contemporaneously by port officials verifying identity documents. Rosa’s birth year was corrected using her Liepāja school enrollment record (1896, LVVA Fond 2201), which listed her age as six. Ewan’s birth year was confirmed by the 1888 Raasay baptismal register (microfilm #SKYE-0044), where “Eòin MacLeòid” appears on May 3, 1888, sponsored by “Donald MacAskill, fisherman.”

This hierarchy prevented us from accepting oral history uncritically. Family lore insisted Rosa sailed directly from Liepāja to Palermo—but manifests prove she traveled via Hamburg and Naples, spending 11 days in quarantine at Isola di Procida. Such precision matters: it explains why her Latvian passport (issued July 1912) bore an Italian visa stamp dated August 22, 1912—not the “summer 1912” date repeated for generations.

What the Documents Didn’t Say—And Why That Matters

Records reveal facts, not feelings. Jānis’s naturalization file contains his thumbprint, but not his fear of the 1918 flu pandemic that killed his first wife in Brooklyn. Rosa’s death certificate lists “tisi,” but omits that she refused hospital care, choosing instead to be nursed by her daughters in the stone house on Via Roma—now demolished and replaced by a Pizzeria da Peppe. Ewan’s Glasgow wage slip shows £2.15s.6d weekly in 1923, but not that he sent 60% home to Raasay, enabling his brother’s purchase of a motorbike (a 1922 Douglas DT 2.75hp, registered AB 3471).

Yet absence speaks. The Liepāja archive holds no letters from Jānis to Rosa after 1912—only a 1927 Western Union telegram receipt ($1.25) addressed to “R. Lo Cascio, Serradifalco,” with no message preserved. In Skye, the 1931 census shows Ewan’s Raasay croft listed as “vacant”—a bureaucratic erasure masking his permanent departure. These silences aren’t failures of research; they’re data points in themselves, mapping displacement, loss, and the limits of institutional memory.

We returned home with 217 digital scans, 3 bound notebooks filled with transcriptions, and a new understanding: genealogy isn’t about restoring a lost wholeness. It’s about accepting fragmentation as historical truth—and honoring ancestors not as idealized figures, but as people who navigated borders, bureaucracies, and broken promises with resilience measured in rubles, lira, and pounds sterling. Their stories weren’t waiting in archives. We had to rebuild them—sentence by sentence, folio by folio, kilometer by kilometer.

The trip cost €4,823.71 total: €1,247 for transport (trains, flights, rental car), €982 for accommodation (hostels, guesthouses, one Airbnb in Portree), €1,412 for archival fees and certified copies, €763 for meals and local transport, and €419.71 for incidentals (translation apps, portable scanner batteries, archival gloves). We tracked every expense in a shared Google Sheet, color-coded by country. The receipts sit in a fireproof box labeled “Ozoliņš–Lo Cascio–MacLeod: Verified Lines.” They’re not relics. They’re evidence—of continuity, contradiction, and the quiet persistence of names across oceans and centuries.

In Liepāja, we bought a replica of the 1906 Latvija passenger list from the port museum gift shop—€12.95, printed on recycled paper. In Serradifalco, we purchased a bottle of Olio Extra Vergine DOP Valli Trapanesi from Frantoio Lo Cascio (est. 1952), batch #2023-087, pressed from olives harvested on land Rosa once walked. In Portree, we commissioned a silver thimble from Hebridean Jewellery, engraved with the coordinates of Raasay’s croft 7B. These objects don’t replace documents. They anchor them—to touch, to taste, to hold. Because genealogy, ultimately, is not just what we find in archives. It’s what we carry home.