I assume at a certain point the records stop for everyone. What’s the record? And how far back in time can the average American go in researching their genealogy?
Royalty and aristocracy probably have the best chance of tracing their genealogy back the farthest because they’ve traditionally ruled and owned land, thus requiring that good family records be kept for inheritance purposes. Queen Elizabeth would be able to trace her geneaology back to at least the Norman kings, if not farther.
a cousin of mine did a family tree some years ago, and traced our mothers’ side back to when they left ireland in the late 1700s. she could have probably gone back further, but didn’t because it was a school project and she had only a limited amount of time to complete it.
so that’s about fourteen generations back, and all done with public records.
and i’m a canadian, not a usian. but assuming your family is from someplace where good public records are/were kept, you should be able to go back at least that far, if not significantly farther.
Adam and Eve, although the documentation of the connections leading to them is highly subject to skepticism! 
Seriously, quite a few provable lineages are available leading back to Charlemagne and to his ancestors, a quasi-independent Roman governor in Gaul named Syagrius in the late 300s being the farthest back I’ve seen people able to prove out linkages to.
Lineages leading to royal lines go back quite a way in most cases. What’s difficult is tracing “normal” non-royal, non-noble lineages back much before 1600.
I can trace it back to Charlemagne, but I’m fortunate that my (late) great-uncle was an historian and archivist in europe.
A really good one.
What’s that, 1100s or so?
More like 800.
I too have traced back Charlemagne and I assume I coudl go a bit further from whatever has know about him. It was 40 odd generations.
Back home, my father has a publication by some Kapole society (Kapole = caste) that traces our lineage to ~800 AD.
One of the best things about being of Icelandic descent is knowing your geneology. I have not seen the documentation, but our family is said to have been traced back to 600 AD on paper, and prior to that without documentation.
I emailed my name and date of birth along with that of my grandparents, to a fellow in Iceland about five or six years ago. He sent me back a detailed family tree, including the name of my then-boyfriend. I would imagine one of Mom’s cousins who takes care of the family geneology sent it to him.
Ah, Iceland. Land of the anal. It’s no wonder scientists wanted to test the human genome project on them.
Late 1600’s, a guy from Bourdeaux who stowed away on a ship and landed in SE Massachusetts. Fortunately, he married a Mayflower granddaughter 
so that branch was easy to trace.
The rest of them–well, from Ireland in 1822, from Ireland in 1885 or so, and "Grandma, what year did you move down from Nova Scotia?’
just wondering, but where abouts in ireland is your family from? mine is from killarney.
I’m pretty sure that anyone whose ancestry is French, would be able to make a family tree that includes Charlemagne. It’s been 48 generations since AD 800, and there’s some kind of rule that says that anyone can trace their ancestry back to any given person, given a certain number of generations, and it’s a lot less than 48.
The last paragraph of this column of Cecil’s touched on this question.
Lessee…McKennas from Monaghan, Walshes from Roscommon.
I have traced mine back to 1760.
Not 10 miles from where I live now.
Here in NC we stay close to home.
I met my father.
The link actually leads here which traces lineage from Cleopatra to Elizabeth II and then from Cleopatra back to Hatshepsut of Egypt.
We have traced our family tree back two past our ancestor that came over from Switzerland in the late 1600s or early 1700s to Lancaster, PA.
Sadly, mine doesn’t go back much farther than this.
Of my four grandparents, I met my dad’s dad’s grandfather (b. 1887), and other than that, my parents knew their grandparents, but that’s about it. My grandmother has done a little bit of geneology-type work and I think she got back to the Civil War, but I haven’t seen it yet. At one point I was told that I was a direct descendant of the guy who founded Birmingham, Alabama, but I’m not sure about that either. Poor people tend not to keep records, and all four of my grandparents came from very very poor families.
[QUOTE=stockton]
I can trace it back to Charlemagne, but I’m fortunate that my (late) great-uncle was an historian and archivist in europe.
Piffle - don’t believe everything your “great-uncle twice removed” says - make him prove it.
I always wondered why my knuckles scraped the ground when I walk - my wife tells me I am from the monkey family.
If she’s right, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.