Mine goes back six generations to 1860, when John and Mary Ancestor hopped off the boat from Ireland. Records in Ireland past that were pretty sketchy. Doesn’t help that we have a really common name. There’s some speculation that they left Ireland under shady circumstances and adopted our current family name in transit from the old country.
This Christmas, my aunt’s gift to me was a two-inch-thick binder containing my family tree, as far as it’s currently known. It goes back 22 (assuming I kept good count while flipping) generations to 1324. Whew!
I’ve seen people claiming to have traced back to Adam and Eve. Insert skeptical smilie here. A lot of it seems based on dubious history and some inattention to dates and the passage of time. I believe it wasn’t uncommon in Victorian times for dodgy historians to manufacture false family histories that connect to Biblical figures and some people today still prefer to believe in them. My memory is very vague on this so I may be messing up some of the finer points.
One branch of my family history is documented back to an ancestor born around the mid 1450’s, 17 generations including myself. The Cornish seem to have kept good records. On my father’s side of the family, I’ve had trouble getting past my great great Grandfather because everyone alive in that generation was a dirty rotten fibber, but he was born around 1810. That’s only 5 generations in nearly 200 years because Great Great Grandfather was 70 when Great Grandfather was born; Great Grandfather was 35 when Grandfather was born; Grandfather was 35 when my father was born. When your ancestors had children late (or were among the youngest children in large families), it doesn’t take long to start running out of reliable records.
This is literally true in at least one case. Not that they actually traced it back that far, but they certainly believed they did.
I was doing historical researcjh in a genealogical library and came across a family history in which they managed to link their family onto some biblical line. As I got further back, I was interested to see how far they’d take it. They took it all the way back to Adam, and then, of course, to God. With a straight face. This family had no doubt about where they came from. Not like all us zombies.
But, like Polycarp says, I’m inclined to take this with a lot of skepticism.
As indicated by the prior posts, there are quite a few people who have traced their lines back 10, 20 or more generations.
“Tracing” is most often the correct word.
For a line in the US, it’s more likely than not you will have great difficulty getting actual evidence much before 1800. There are records before this, but George Smith of any particular town may not be the same George Smith of the same town who was the father of the ancestor you have proven and records of that time seldom help in that regard.
My bet would be on the Icelandic folks - they’ve kept very good records, plus the population is small and concentrated.
Like someone earlier, my family has lived within about 20 miles of where they do now for as long as I can determine (1630) through documentation.
I can prove fourteen of my sixteen great-great-grandparents. Eight of them I can track back a few more generations; two of them tie into researched-out genealogies that take me back into the classic medieval-peerage genealogies.
Yeah, but YOU turned out OK. 
Mehitabel, I see that you are from the Bronx. You woudn’t be related to Christine McKenna, would you? Let’s see, there’s Aunt Anna, Aunt May, Uncle Bill - any of these sound familiar?
My father said he was able to trace our ancestry back to the 10th century through his mother’s side. They were land owners and low-grade nobility. However, my other three grandparents had no family tree to speak of. We’re able to go back to just after the Civil War (my parents’ grandparents) but that’s about it.
It seems that in Europe it’s impossible to trace even the nobility’s ancestry over the dark ages, so family trees won’t go before Frankish kings. The longest family tree seems to be in China: it’s the family of Confucius. We know the genealogy back to his grandfather, I think, who lived before 600 BC. After Confucius, the Chinese rulers kept identifying the great philosopher’s descendants and honoring them with various benefits. This tradition has kept to the modern ages, so the current descendants in Taiwan have their family tree 2600 years, or about 80 generations long.
(On a related note, I’ve heard a claim that practically every person of Eurasian descent is also descendant of Confucius, just like every European is descendant of Charlemagne and Muhammed among others. Don’t know whether that’s true or not; it’s certainly sounds possible but there’s no way to verify.)
Several members of my large family have done a lot of work, and found a “long lost cousin” in Wolfsburg Germany, who acknowledges us as his family, although our last common ancestor was from there in 1536. My brother got a free dinner out of it. He told my brother that the changes in language in that region during the earlier years made name tracing highly speculative, before 1500.
Interestingly enough, one of the maternal lines back in the early 1800 came from a guy named Peterson, who got off a ship from England, and founded his family in Philadelphia. The odd part was that same guy died on board that same ship, and his family in England was notified of his death. That family’s church had very good records. So, we have a mystery. Am I descended from the real Peterson, who fled some problem in England by lying about his death? Or, am I descended from some other nefarious character, who used the opportunity of Peterson’s demise aboard ship (or even killed him!) to escape his own real identity?
Tris
Rule of Reason: “If nobody uses it, there’s a reason.”
Over the past six years, I’ve traced many of my family lines back to the 16th century, which seems to be a wall that many run into. Other lines can only be traced to the 18th century because of missing records and the economic or social standing of the families.
A few lines are at a dead end in the late 19th century. This is primarily because female births were not always recorded, women not being considered as important in some cases.
I have one document purporting to trace my Saunders line back to 1170, but the document is somewhat suspect, linking the family to European royalty and such. But I’ve always considered myself a real prince.
My brother is the family genealogy expert. His research takes us back to the 1600s in Scotland, on my mother’s side. On my father’s side, we hit a brick wall after his father. There is very little information about his family, because my grandfather was given up to a home for unwanted children in London when he was in his single digits, we figure due to family poverty. Later, he made his way to Canada. The woman he married in Canada also had the same last name as him (she was born in Cardiff), and stayed at the same children’s home in London - although not at the same time. There is no information on her family at all.
My family can definitely trace back to my Great^4 Grandfather. Using detective work, we can claim a fellow by name of Caleb [Magill] who is either my G^4GF’s father or brother.* From Caleb we can get to John [Magill] in Jamestown in 1622. From John [Magill], we can go back three generations in England to the mid 1500s.
- Things get difficult in antebellum South Carolina, since Sherman’s men thought Columbia would make good kindling
Queen Elizabeth is not a descendant of William of Normandy. She is of German descent; her family is from Hannover.
And that other post by kniz that had her descended from Hatshepsut is just … Pitworthy! But I don’t have the time right now to teach people world history.
Quoth CalMeacham:
Yeah, but did they have all their ancestors documented, like the Unwed Mother did?
And more seriously, what’s the furthest back anyone has ever traced their entire ancestry? Sure, some folks can take a particular strand back 40 generations, but that’s only about a trillionth of the whole family tree to that point. Is there anyone who can list, say, all 1024 (or less, of course, if there’s some degeneracy) of his great[sup]8[/sup]-grandparents?
Here (PDF) is the paper that makes that claim. There was also an Atlantic Monthly article about it in 2002. Here is the only full version I found online (sorry for the awful colors).
She is both. The Hannoverian kings of England were descended from a daughter of James I. Here is a Tudor/Stuart family tree (PDF) from the official British Monarchy site showing that descent.
Cisco wrote
Well…
You don’t know the ancestors of any of your grandparents, but if you looked, I bet you could find some.
Most of this stuff is done by searching government records, specifically, birth, death, marriage and census records. It’s very likely there’s information on your ancestors if you wanted to find it.