Is this an ancestor problem?

Hey. First the preliminaries: Saxon 9 Java; XSLT 2.0 & XPath 2.0. I
have been attempting to select the title text of a DocBook table title
,with no success, like so:

   <xsl:param name="u" select="(//db:row[xs:string(@role) eq
xs:string($x)]/*)//ancestor::db:title[1]/*" as="node()*"/>

the path in the parentheses will match the table row I want, however I
can not get the table title.

The XML for the DocBook file is:

 <table>
        <title role="adhoc">This is what I want to match</title>

        <tgroup cols="7">
          <tbody role="1">
            <row>
              <entry align="center"><emphasis role="bold">xxx</emphasis></entry>

              <entry align="center"><emphasis role="bold">yyy</emphasis></entry>

              <entry align="center"><emphasis role="bold">zzz</emphasis></entry>

              <entry align="center"><emphasis role="bold">uuu</emphasis></entry>

              <entry align="center"><emphasis role="bold">kkk</emphasis></entry>

              <entry align="center"><emphasis role="bold">nnn</emphasis></entry>

              <entry align="center"><emphasis role="bold">qqq</emphasis></entry>
            </row>

            <row role="1"><!--this is where I start from-->
              <entry align="center" >u</entry>

              <entry align="center" >k</entry>

              <entry align="center" >e</entry>

              <entry align="center" >i</entry>

              <entry align="center" >p</entry>

              <entry align="center" >z</entry>

              <entry align="center" >a</entry>
            </row>
          </tbody>
        </tgroup>
      </table>

Maybe I have misunderstood the role of ancestor::? It wouldn't be the
first time I made a bad assumption about XPath or XSLT. Any salient
help will be greatly appreciated. I apologize if I didn't follow the
proper posting etiquette. Thanks.