Go adding items to array recursively not working

I have been doing some golang programming and usually has been lot of fun. Now I have this code I need to port from C# to go and it is just not working.
The idea is to fill a tree of employees from database but inner slices are not being filled up on each call.
Better to write the code here

func (db *DalBase) TitleAllChildren(tx *gorp.Transaction) (items []Title, err error) {
var dbChildren []entities.Title
_, err = tx.Select(&dbChildren, "select * from title where idparent is null order by name")
if err != nil {
return
}
items = make([]Title, 0)
for i := range dbChildren {
currItem := &dbChildren[i]
item := &Title{Id: currItem.Id, Name: currItem.Name}
err = db.TitleChildrenRecursive(tx, item)
if err != nil {
return
}
items = append(items, *item)
}
return
}
func (db *DalBase) TitleChildrenRecursive(tx *gorp.Transaction, u *Title) (err error) {
var dbChildren []entities.Title
_, err = tx.Select(&dbChildren, "select * from title where idparent = $1 order by name", u.Id)
if err != nil {
return
}
if len(dbChildren) != 0 {
u.Items = make([]Title, 0)
for i := range dbChildren {
currItem := &dbChildren[i]
item := &Title{Id: currItem.Id, Name: currItem.Name}
err = db.TitleChildrenRecursive(tx, item)
if err != nil {
return
}
u.Items = append(item.Items, *item)
}
}
return
}

I have logged the values on each recursive call and they are being filled inside the function, but when it bubbles up to the parent, slices are empty.

I wouldn't like to use pointers to slices, is it possible to implement?

Edit: here is the struct I am trying to fill

type Title struct {
Id    string  `json:"id"`
Name  string  `json:"name"`
Items []Title `json:"items"`
}

You won't need a pointer to a slice, as long you are passing around a pointer to the struct which contains your slice.

Each time you call TitleChildrenRecursive, you're replacing your slice with a new one before anything is appended:

u.Items = make([]Title, 0)

There's no need to make a new slice, since append works correctly with a nil slice.

You should also change []Title to []*Title, so that if any append operations happen to children items after they are added to the slice, it's reflected throughout the tree.