My mother’s family came from a village near Munich in the 1770’s. My father’s family came from Scotland in the 1750’s.
My great grandmother went to Europe and spent a year there tracing our ancestors on my mom’s and dad’s side.
Using church records she was able to trace our ancestry back to before 1000 AD. Best part was she wrote it all down and had it bound in a book.
Scottish and Irish records are very incompletely preserved. A lot of Americans have “Scots-Irish” ancestry, meaning their Scottish ancestors lived in Northern Ireland before coming to America. I have some Scots-Irish ancestry on my mother’s side and although it is a relatively rare name and we know where they originated in Scotland, we can’t make a connection between any of the families in Scotland and the ancestor who was living in Virginia in the 1750s. I have looked at a lot of the old records on microfilm and even spent a couple of days in Edinburgh at the archive, but too many parish records are just gone.