Replies

I have done a lot or work on ancestry.com researching my own maternal side. I was orphaned and with the help of a PI I learned who my maternal side is. The father's name is on the records at Catholic Charities but not, it seems on the original birth certificate, so I have no way to get it and the laws of MO are against me inasmuch as my natural mother id now deceased..(oh I did talk with her one time only and she did not deny anything..didn't share information but did not deny it and all I told her was my birth date..)
ANYWAY, with the info provided by the PI I was able to track the maternal side to England, Ireland, Scotland, Iceland, France...discovered there are a couple of saints in the lot, many heads of nobility and connections to the Plantagenet line of kings. I tell friends I don't stand on ceremony and we will dispense with all that bowing and scraping stuff.
If one is an Icelander,they are in luck as those folks have kept such detailed genealogy records they can track their ancestry to before rocks. They are amazing!! Point is, with the bit of info that is public knowledge about 0bama's mother and her relatives it would be easy to track that back,time consuming but not really all that hard.
Searching some other races or nationalities is more difficult such as the blacks because of the issue of slavery and the fact that these people were taken from their homeland and families so split up. Also there is some difficulty with the Mexican nationality ( my husband's family) because of the lack of records. If the families have documents or letters or a line they kept there is a way to start.
But even with that said, eventually one can run into dead ends. I ran into dead ends with the men of my maternal side but the women had many more links that I could track back. Then too, there are others doing the same research on family names and with all of this information found ones work can be cross checked.