Make your best effort to document the family history. It is easily lost as each generation passes. The advent of DNA family tracing has helped connect some of my family records. My dad reconnected with his half brother. His half brother's mom died in child birth. I now have a connection to cousins that would have disappeared from the family records.
I agree entirely. I have been working on genealogy since I was 21 years old, spent many hours looking at census records on microfilm readers before they were made available online, have visited archives in the UK and Eastern Europe. My maternal grandfather died when I was a baby so never knew him but learned a lot from his sister and brother.
My other grandfather lived to 93 so I tried to think of questions to ask him while he was still alive. On one of my paternal grandmother's lines I can trace back to about 1200 but on my maternal grandmother's side I can only get back to her grandfathers (both immigrants and I don't know their exact places of birth).
I think it's kind of cool to have been able to join the SAR while being just a third-generation American on one side.