If you’re trying to find long lost relatives, I hope you’re better at it than I am. Last week, I walked the streets of San Vito Lo Capo, on the northwest tip of Sicily, looking for roots and branches of the family tree. But I didn’t have much to go on, and it didn’t help that I don’t speak Italian, or that few people in San Vito speak English.

Finding relatives wasn’t the main objective of the vacation with my wife and daughter, but still, I wished I’d done more research in advance. And I wished I’d asked my mother more questions about our family story before she died six months ago. What I did know was that my grandmother, Josephine Costanza, left Sicily in the early 1900s as a young girl, landed in California and later married a young man recently off the boat from Naples, Italy .