I imagine you had the same sentimental rush of emotions when you visited your grandmother's old home. I ran into 3 elderly people sitting on a bench next to a mountain spring fountain. One was swatting away bees. I went over and spoke to them and spent a half hour there. They knew practically everything about my family though we haven't had a family member in the village for decades. My father now has Alzheimer's and he is no longer a source for tying family relations, but the woman sitting there told me her sister had married my father's cousin (no surprise in these mountain villages) and moved to the USA. I hadn't been to that village since I was 7 years old, and we wouldn't have gone this time were it not for the shabbiness of Athens.

Recently, I discovered the Mormon Genealogical Archives online. They are truly committing an act of cultural heroism with the archives, even if the stated intention is the after-death conversion of people to Mormonism by Baptism. I found records of 3 men from my mother's village with her same last name that came to the USA in the 1890s. My mother checked with an older relative who confirmed the men were my grandfather's cousins and one uncle. Would have never known had it not been for the Mormon archives.