I think you have to try and find something you have in common with what is there, something you share or a way of looking at what is there which you can relate to. What that might be, you can best answer. It would perhaps depend on how you define yourself, your identity. Typically you would know that through your parents perhaps. For me, when I went home to Wales, it was not the spirit of place so much as I could see the connection in the personality structures of the relatives on my mother's side. The rest of her relatives were in England apart from some in Australia whom I did not see. But the exploration of their personality was not enough and so for my father who was a coal miner for 22 years, I went down a coal mine and explored the many tiny tunnels, the places where the pit ponies lived, the seams and so on. All the lights were switched off and the darkness is total, the blackest black you will ever experience as no single photons even, make it down here. That became a kind of metaphor for the image of the family. My father's side of the family didn't want to know him and the same was true for me as well, we had not met since I was an infant. 

After I returned I dug into the family history (mother's side) since 1858 via online genealogies and other sources and what they went through in life as well as their genetic legacy created the structures that exist and prevail today, in a sort of relentless determinism. As far as I know no one has looked into that history in such great depth. The point for me was to try and change it by giving them that information. It's an invasive thing to do. 

In that way I understood myself as being part of an enfolded process that is constantly unfolding and like you, I am totally cut off from this past, especially in virtue of being outside and looking in. I am different and that capacity to understand is a large part of what makes all the difference. The roots were not in Wales but rather Dublin, Ireland. So don't become fixated on place, look at structures or concepts.  My feeling is the feeling of Ireland as well as Wales, by that I mean, a Celtic thing, in particular, an understanding and appreciation of language. When I read the Irish writers I feel at home. A large other part of me, the ability to do mathematics seems to have come from my father who was very good at that. For others, it might be music or painting...

The meaning of a connection is that you would feel grounded in the world, a part of it and have something which is a kind of centre that you operate from. That has it's benefits but also it's drawbacks. There is baggage in the past and if it bothers then perhaps it is worth knowing as one overcomes it by understanding it. If you tell us what part of Eastern Europe I (or others) might be able to make a suggestion as I have travelled there.

All the best in your search.

Indeed, these questions of roots are quite complex.  Imogen, your question dovetails nicely with the discussion about letting go of old beliefs -- how to take the measure of their usefulness and effect on one's life and thought. As with ancestral memories, one is put in the difficult position of having to either make peace with those one has been given or else knowingly remove oneself from one's roots: substitution is not really possible. Of course, one can convert in the religious case, or marry into someone else's roots: but neither is exactly what we are discussing here.

That said, there is perhaps something useful in considering roots as process rather than fact: which is to say, as stories in which one becomes continually invested and which one is constantly in the process of telling, rather than simply as stories which one is told. All of one's trips home, all of one's struggling with the questions of what home is and what homes are -- this too is a process of laying down roots. Even the disappointments of this process can reveal interesting things. You are the live tree in the shifting landscape, laying down roots and spreading branches. 

Perhaps then, the experience of not being able to enter the past is a useful spur to setting down roots. I will have to think about this.

I am not sure what I was expecting -- something. I am not particularly sentimental and yet I do feel a pleasure in thinking that the past is well arranged and in traveling to different places after reading histories. I did not feel a particular absence of personal history in this case until I by chance took a trip and experienced the sudden anticlimax. No one I am related to is still living there, so this is perhaps a factor. No human connection and what is the use of talking to stones?

I do not really expect that someone would suddenly tell me I look like one of my great-grandmothers, in any case they all had dark hair! So why do I feel I should have a physical connection to the landscape they lived in? Funny that I would want an instinctive response, a physical response. I am not a usually emotional person who cries at old photographs and songs.