With only very minor nobility on the family, an uncle traced our family to the 13th century.
Since I can benefit from the 10 years statute of limitation for “being wrong on the internet”, I now admit freely to the fact that I was indeed wrong on this topic in 2002.
I failed to take into account descent in female line, as far as I can tell.
I thought the rule was 10 days!
I’m fucked.
Oh dear, I hope not! But you are apparently still alive. Never heard of anyone posting from beyond the grave.
My wife was into genealogy in a serious way. Her ancestors came from Normandy and since they were landed gentry, their names were recorded as a matter of record. So, she had a traceable bloodline back to 915 CE. Those people eventually came across the Channel during the conquest and were given lands in the Channel Isles.
And those who can trace their ancestry because the father of the person who had the records burned had made copies.
What about Sid Caesar?
Johanna:
Not even in a zombie thread?
Just reviving this to point out that the last few paragraphs are only true if one has a very loose definition of what constitutes documentation. No modern day scholarly (i.e. relying on good evidence instead of guesswork and heavy conjecture) genealogist recognizes any Norwegian family line going beyond the black death, except for the top noble lines, and even those fall apart well before you reach the Viking age and Harald Fairhair.
There are however lots of sources for dubious lineages going back that far, but they all rely on shoddy analysis of available records or outright fraud, some of it commited by 18th and 19th century academics and accepted as gospel by 20th century genealogists.
I’m a direct descendant of Edward the Childless.
I enjoy genealogy, but go back not too far and we were German peasants. No real records, even though I’ve been to the little Bavarian town they came from and to the archives in Regensburg. That line just stops around 1820. My English line stops in the early 1700s. They just weren’t important enough, so I know I will never get to Roman ancestry.
So, your father was a Woman, was he?
Yes, Naughtius Maximus.
My family are dull, both sides lived in the Home Counties and did diddly-squat as domestic servants as far back as I can trace into the 18th Century 
Given the ethnic mixing that took place in Europe over the past 2000 years, I would be surprised if there are any white people who have no Ancient Roman ancestry. The Romans were everywhere - Spain, Gaul, Britain, Greece, Egypt, Judea, Libya, Asia Minor. Also, the Romans were a military and economic empire rather than a big happy family old boys club - There were people who would have been, say, of German, Greek, or Egyptian ethnic origin who were Roman citizens and presumably married into other Roman families, making everyone multi-ethnic to some extent.
The Vikings likewise traveled widely and would have left their DNA all over the place, even beyond Scandinavia. The Viking influence in the British Isles was tremendous and anyone with any British ancestry is almost certainly a Viking in some way. The Danelaw in England influenced the English language in England, and the Germanic Scots dialect is arguably more Scandinavian than English English. Despite being a garment associated primarily with Celts, the actual word “kilt” comes from a Scandinavian word meaning to tuck. Both the Scots and the French have a hybrid ethnic identity composed of Celtic and Germanic elements.
There aren’t really any “pure ethnic <ethnicity>s” anywhere.
Nine generations you’ll have 512 ancestors you could potentially trace through (if none are the same). Maybe there’s something more interesting to be found.
Sorry, I suppose I meant to say “Nine generations ago …” or something.
Been away from the board a lot lately, so just now noticing this.
Anyway, there have been several threads similar to the OPs and quite related to the revival post (RP?) over the years. The advantage people in those later threads have is being able to post a link to the Wikipedia page on Descent From Antiquity. OTOH, that page keeps getting munged with and is currently in a poor state. But it’s a place to start reading.
When I started to research my tree, I discovered that there are two distinct kinds of genealogist: One group happily latches on to the smallest link, coincidence or similarity, and the other will not accept anything that is not supported by original documents.
It is no coincidence that the first group can trace their ancestry a lot further back than the latter. Whether their tree is accurate, or just a collection of random names, is open to conjecture.
I’ve found stuff compiled by the first group while looking for information about my distant US cousins where they’d uncritically used the US census and added two people with the same name and birth year as one person with two wives and all the accompanying children. When one does such things, or accept data from others without checking if they’re the kind of person who does such things, one isn’t a genealogist, but a name collector.
And without going to official or first hand sources you never know if somewhere in the chain from the data you’re offered and the original source there isn’t a name collector who’s just accepted something that sort of fit what they were looking for.