Howdy, cousin! My Mayflower roots are William Brewster and William Bradford. Those lucky enough to have Mayflower travelers or American Revolution ancestors (I have both) have an easier job of tracing some family lines, as they’re pretty well documented. My great grandmother was a member of the DAR, so her line is easy to find.
Oh sure, that does happen, but WikiTree contributors tend to be more serious/seasoned enthusiasts.
And, most importantly, there is no “this is my tree, and that’s your tree” or “this is my person; no one can touch it”. No one “owns” an entry, though a person can be designated as a “profile manager” (but they have no extra authority over additions/corrections).
It ain’t perfect, but it is probably the best current example of a single shared tree, especially one that emphasizes confidence levels and citations and reviews. Also, their widgets (most built by members) are super-cool. Below is my connect to William Bradford: Relationship Finder
I think “reliably” covers many issues.
My spouse is enormously invested in a genealogy hobby, has spent thousands of hours, and has found thousands of people. We have also done DNA testing specifically for genealogy, using three different services, and going back about 5 generations have identified some of the same people by research and by DNA analysis.
One of the people she connected me to is a famous genealogist, by a common ancestor a few generations back. That genealogist has the part of her tree that we share traced back through Charlemagne and beyond, to about 46 AD (IIRC).
Charlemagne had many children and grandchildren, meaning he’s thoroughly planted in the ancestry of all people of European descent. Since he lived about 1200 years ago, or 60 generations ago, in his day, there are about 2^60 or one billion billion spaces in our ancestor trees. But there were only about 25 million people in Europe at that time. There is a great deal of duplication in our ancestor trees, and for European descended people there would be an average 46 billion instances in our tree for each of the people alive then. Roughly, we might figure each of us has tens of billions of lines back to Charlemagne. But of course the bigger challenge is to be able to trace even one of those lines.
Well, anyway, I don’t have a specific reason to doubt this line or any of the others that go back hundreds of years (via the famous genealogist or not), but I also recognize the many things that could possibly go wrong.
I’ve read, similarly, that some humongous number of living Brits are descendants of William the Conqueror. Therefore, as a descendant of Brits, I would like to formally change my last name to “the Conqueror” 
Velomont the Conquerer… has a nice ring to it.
Nope. All European genealogies break in the centuries following the collapse of the Empire. There simply isn’t any real documentation linking anyone from before 500 AD to the Charlemagne records and beyond. The claims about Muhammad and Confucius are plausible, but there is no reliable descent from antiquity in Europe.
I had a friend who bartended at a local bar who mentioned offhand at one point that his mother, from Kenya, was part of a strong oral ancestral tradition. He said that they could trace their ancestry back, name by name, to fisherfolk that lived along the shores of Lake Victoria, going back about 2,000 years. So there’s that.
Curious about this – can you point me to a cite?
Previous thread on topic:
Oh, and it doesn’t take much luck for a normal person to get back that far. My first ancestor (other than the thin Shawnee branch) to come to America was in 1775, and it wasn’t hard at all to trace that far back. Plenty of ordinary folk can reach the Mayflower, in 1620, or even earlier.
I’m not sure how good European records typically are, compared to American ones.
I remember seeing an episode of Finding Your Roots on PBS where they traced actor and comedian Fred Armisen’s paternal line back to the 800s in Korea. Koreans apparently keep meticulous family records.
That’s part of what I was thinking.
For most Americans assuming they knew anything about their ancestors, the first big hurdle is finding their records when they came to the US. Lots of people sort of started over and/or didn’t really carry forward the knowledge of where they were from in much detail.
For example, my great x4 grandfather was born in Wurttemberg in 1813 and emigrated to what would become part of the US in 1835. From there, we know a LOT about his descendants. But I wouldn’t even know what parish church in Wurttemberg to go look up his birth records in.
But if I did, it’s likely that we could go back in that area for quite a while. The local churches kept birth/death/marriage records from quite early on.
But another great grandfather is sort of a black hole. He and his brother ran away from home as boys from Terre Haute, IN, and that’s all we know. No idea if it was Terre Haute proper, or some little town near there, if they kept their actual last name, or anything else.
I co worker has a collection of bibles going back to 1580 with his family tree in it. I think there are 18 bibles in his collection, so he can go back a long way.
There are any number of problems with records of any sort. Quite often, female births weren’t recorded, as females had no inheritance rights, nor were they considered important to the work force. This is true in both Europe and America. Births were often recorded in church records, but not in any other format. If those records were lost to fire or flood or just antiquity, then the line is broken. Also, unless one was royalty, nobody really cared whether or not your existence was recorded. For example, even though I had a researcher looking for my father’s ancestry in Prussia, he was only able to go back as far as 1735 with church records.
DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) traces back to the 1770’s. I’ve heard their research is accurate.
My Aunt claimed to trace our family back to a village in 1600’s Holland. Some brothers that immigrated to the colonies. I’m skeptical but she spent many years on research before the Internet. She even traveled and visited libraries and cemeteries tracing people.
How far back has anyone’s ancestry been confirmed through DNA analysis?
Interesting to hear about these long lineages recorded by Dopers. I can trace my family more than twice as far back now as I could have when I was born. There are some guesses possible beyond that based on immigration records, but names and dates prior to 1894 are all fuzzy.
3.5 billion years?
I know that’s not what you meant, but I’m not sure exactly what you do envision. DNA will tell you that (if you go far enough back) we all share the same ancestry, or more recently that some of your ancestors came from certain regional subpopulations, but it won’t point to specific people or specific lineages, because there with be a vast number of paths with the number of ancestors doubling each generation.
The exception is where you don’t have a doubling of the number of ancestors each generation, with the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA. There we do have (for example) the hypothesis that a widely shared Y chromosome came from Genghis Khan.
DNA is also of course extremely useful in telling us about ancestry at the species level - molecular phylogenetics.
European records are usually pretty good the moment they are written down, at least for men, usually including births, marriages, deaths and the data that are relevant for governments who want to tax you or conscript your children. But they did not always keep well, we had too many wars. Here is a list of conflicts in Europe and it is pretty long (some conflicts, admittedly, were minor).
It all depends on what sources are available. Searching American geneaology, it seems like most Americans are effectively undocumented before 1820, unless they were a public figure or were involved in a significant legal proceeding (like land purchase or inheritance).
I’m aware that some Nordic countries have obsessively maintained family records going back many hundreds of years.
If I accept the dubious, sketchy online lineages for some of my ancestry, then it connects to some minor British nobility, who hook into known Viking-descended families of northern Europe, which goes all the way back to the first god-king of Finland. So I’ve got that going for me. But all of that depends on how much credit you put on that documentary evidence.
DNA evidence can help somewhat, but it’s no guarantee. Through the various DNA ancestry sites, I’m aware that others also claim to be descended from the first god-king of Finland. The degree of relatedness does suggest we had a common ancestor in the last 1000-2000 years. But I have no way to know exactly where that DNA connection came from. We both potentially have thousands of grandparents in that timeframe, most of them being unrecorded commoners. So it’s impossible to know if I’m connected through these people through our shared commoner ancestors, or if they are an authentic god-king like me.
I did write ‘analysis’, but I really meant ‘comparison’ of DNA to known people in the past, if any DNA is available from them. If you can find a number of people who are shown to be related you might be able to use that to determine a common ancestor, although that alone wouldn’t accurately identify that ancestor.