I’m late posting, but this gave me chills. Way cool!
My Mom’s side can be traced back 7 generations to 1643 in Cadenberge, Germany. the relative who was doing the geneology was told that attempts to go back further would be nigh impossible, because earlier records had been destroyed by fire, the earlier church having been of wood.
She was also told that the family may have gone back as far as the 1100s, tilling the same soil, farming the same land, generation after generation.
My Dad’s side, who were once described as being either Ministers or horse thieves, depending on which way they chose… goes back to Pinneberg, Germany in the early 1800s. It seems Great great great? Granny was a maid to the Mayor of Pinneberg, whose wife was barren. As was the custom of the time, the Mayor (whose family name was von Mayser, I believe) impregnated my Granny.
After a year or two, Granny decided the esteemed Mayor was an asshole and fled his household with her two boys. The boys got on a boat to America together when they were in their teens and by the time they arrived had irritated each other so much that they split up. Now my family tree has two separate and distinct branches, each leading to one of the brothers.
Back to the 1600’s here… the most interesting thing i found was that we’re probably related to the Frankensteins. Turns out that my Great(5X) grandfather was baptized there.
Catherine, Kathryn, Katherine, Katheryn: all acceptable variations, depending on which history you read.
Omega, have you found anything interesting?
I would like very much to find my roots. In the mean time, I’ve been randomly embracing Ghana as my motha land.
Oh, when I saw your name here, I was hoping you’d found something.
I’m looking at the census records on ancestry.com and haven’t found much yet. Maybe my relatives decided to boycott the census. I did trace one line back to the 1870s*, where it stopped, since they didn’t record slaves by name before that.
Too late to edit -
Ghana sounds good, Nzinga. I might start claiming that too. 
I’ve actually thought about getting that DNA test where they match you to different regions and tribes of the world, out of curiosity.
Also, for things we’ve disproved, it seems so far that my Cherokee great^n grandmother stories are as bogus as most other people’s, based on the census records, (unless they accidentally got marked M for mulatto, but I doubt it). I wonder why so many Americans have this fictional relative.
Thanks for posting, everyone. Great stories.
I’m sure they cared at the time, just as I’m sure you care about how your name is spelled, chifgiy. 
You may need to broaden your search. Look for siblings; focus on known locations; etc. In addition to spelling variations, the census takers often used hard-to-read cursive and the transcriptions may be way off. I dimly remember one case where the state “Missouri” was transcribed as “Wisconsin”. Looking at the actual census image you could figure out which was intended, but you could also see that it looked almost like the other (seemingly very different) state name.
Oh, I did forget another thing that I found pretty interesting.
So, I inherited the genealogy research after my cousin (well… 2nd cousin twice removed) got too old to do it. She gave me all of her records including a big stack of handwritten notes that she hasn’t had a chance to go through yet. Most of these were from “the aunts” that lived in upstate Michigan in the early 1900’s. They only spoke German, and wrote weekly to relatives overseas. One problem is that they only wrote in Low German. The other problem was that the aunts had very poor penmanship. So, my cousin just left these aside.
Well, I started going through these letters and noticed that they indeed did have crappy handwriting, but it was identical to my crappy handwriting. Eerily identical. I was able to transcribe the letters without even giving it two looks. So now I’m just waiting on a really nice Amish family (which seems to be the only source of translating low German nowadays) to get back to me with the translations.
Maybe we could get together, go to the reservation and ask a sweet old Native American woman to legally adopt us. All of us. Every single black American. Then finally we can all say “My Grandmother is Native American!” Haa!
Those are good tips, and looking for siblings is how I found a set of great great grandparents, and the ggg grandmother who happened to be living with them at the time. I submitted a couple of alternative names too (the right ones, that got lost in reading the cursive) so hopefully if another relative comes along, they might have a bit of an easier time. The problem is I really don’t know much about this branch, and where they were at different times, as my grandfather and most of his siblings died of various causes in the 40s and 50s, and since they were born in the 20s and 30s, they left little kids behind who weren’t old enough to learn much family history. So, I think that’s going to be a dead end for now.
My grandmother would pay good money for that.
If we can find one who can be considered a princess in some way (since I’ve seen more than a few posters mention that their NA ancestor was royalty), we could take every American on that field trip to get adopted, and validate everyone’s stories at once.
Wow, that’s pretty lucky.
Ah! Yes, I do recall learning on this board that it isn’t just black Americans that suffer “My grandma was a Cherokee Princess” syndrome. Before the dope, I thought that was a ‘black thang’.
The farthest back family record I have is the marriage of Gilles Charron and Magdeleine Babault in France in 1610. These were my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents.
I have a Native friend (Ojibway) who claims black ancestry (she and many of her relatives have spiral curls instead of straight hair), so perhaps there is some truth to native ancestry, but stories of Native princesses - that is another story.
Just a helpful note: for anybody who has family history in Washington state, they have an amazing amount of information in digital archives online. And it’s free! I wish the rest of the US would do the same. Some states have carried the privacy nonsense to such extremes that you can’t find or obtain much of anything. Yeah, I’m lookin’ at YOU, New York.