But it's fun. Once you get back to a gateway American ancestor/ress, the rest of it has been professionally done, etc.
I Still Care: I mainly do direct ancestors but have had fun with some collaterals.
Was this King John the son of Henry I? I have two going back to him, can't get at my genealogy program on my pc which didn't crash but close to it.
I suppose we are all related; I've never found one American president unless Obama goes back to Wm. Conqueror on his mother's side or this King John.
I found a lost line actually two or more lines on my mother's side. They manufactured guns in Kansas City. I look for everybody no matter how insignificant their lives may have seemed to others. And am major stuck on three brick walls I'd like to break through.
I've loved meeting like 3rd cousins I didn't know I had and corresponding with them. We had a published genealogy on my father's side which gave me a head start. But my mother worked on it a few years before she died. The clues she left were priceless, and with the internet, I made connections that I might never have made. My gr grandfather was a twin, and my mother lost the other one in Nebraska. I met up with a descendant of the lost twin, and I had the "rosetta stone" or where to look going further back, I knew his parents and a sibling had died from small pox. Later the third cousin I met confirmed it when he found an obscure diary left by a fellow in PA. He had traced his to IL then was stuck until I told him what county they were from in PA and how the census made it so hard to find the surviving orphaned children. It all came together at last.
Only one King John in English history.
I have several brick walls also. One is that I am descended from a certain family name in Penn Dutch country in PA. Ha! That probably narrows it down to oh, say, thousands of people. As you probably know, there are a million Millers, Yoders, Fishers, etc.
Another is someone who emigrated from Scotland in the early 1800’s. Haven’t started my out of the country digs yet, unless they are well documented.
I’ve got a royal line going to the Howards in tudor England. That seems interesting. And I am a direct descendent of the early Scottish Kings, Malcolm being one of them. But as you know, there’s no end to this stuff.
What I find interesting is if you can find stories from even several hundred years ago, there are traits that really do seem to carry through many generations. My family was always politically involved, always readers and either educated or self taught, always religious pioneers, always ferociously dedicated to personal freedom and liberty. There is also a physical trait I have traced back about 400 years, that is interesting.