i posted this in another thread:

i have a related question, how far can you go?
so much was lost in emigration from europe, with name changes and language differences. the only lines follow-able are those i can read and find which means a single line when i'm up 6 levels, everything else is inaccessible. at this same point my wife's line is still in the same few states, with no immigration at all. which is more typical? too many people or too few? can almost everyone find a line that seems to go on forever? this seems a little suspicious to me, especially when i see 100's of ancestry trees at the same person. are we all following the few documented lines. or are we all mistakenly tying into them? since that is what is available?



and it got me thinking.
what is normal for a new family tree researcher to encounter?
at the great grand parent level 7 of my 8 branches are stalled, 1 missing grandfather data and 6 branches leading to europe.
meanwhile both the one remaining branch and all my wife's branches are well documented with 100's of people researching/mindlessly clicking through them into the 1500's at least.

1.what is normal?
2.are all these people, probably including me, following well traveled family trees really part of them, or are we there because the rest of the genealogy-world is an undocumented thicket?

rmwilliamsjr@gmail.com