The 23andMe results are misleading to most people. they don't say what most people think the say and DNA is less important than culture anyway.
I'd encourage every one to do this basic family tree research because it's a lot of fun and people should know their family history.
I have tracked all four branches of my family back to the 1600's. I know where they lived, what they did for a Living and what religion they were. In some cases, I
know where the went to school. These days it would have been simpler because of all the online resources stating with Family Search.
Europeans are much more conscious of their family tree than Americans are. I have visited family members in Ireland, France and Germany in their homes. It's an incredible experience.
Your ability to do this is affected greatly by where they emigrated from and when they got to the US. If, for example, you have ancestors who came from Ireland during the Great Famine, you are going to have a devil of a time finding them.
If you have German ancestors who came in the 1890's, you'll find a lot of info. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the Germans kept good records and the rural Irish did not.
In my experience, Ancestry is better for US records like City Directories and military service records.
Because 23 and Me gives me a slightly different answer, I pretty much have ignored it.
The best place to start is with the 1940 Census and then work back in time from there.
Be prepared for some surprises, some of them unpleasant. And you'll also find that some of the family oral history was incorrect or misinterpreted.
Oh, geez, you ain't lying!
My wife's mother's family were rural Jews in "Galicia" - what is now the German/Poland/Czech border lands. There were pogroms, and entire villages were wiped out by Russians and Central European thugs in the late 1800s. What was left of my wife's mother's family were mostly killed in the Holocaust. Only a handful of her relatives made it to the US.
My mother's family, on the other hand, were early pioneers of Florida, having moved there from Georgia, and before that North Carolina, and before that, Jamestown, VA, where some of them first arrived in 1634.
Another branch of my mother's family had Quaker ancestors who immigrated to Connecticut from Lancashire, England (the birthplace of the Quaker / "Friends" movement), and then moved to Pennsylvania, which was the first colony in the New World that had religious freedom. Among those early settlers, one of them married a Native American, gave him an English sounding name, and tried to pass him off as Irish. LOL
One of our ancestors, in the Albritton family, was among Quaker families who were massacred by the Lenni Lenape natives in West PA when the sons of William Penn tried to renege on a treaty. Penn had actually purchased the original land for Pennsylvania, and the Lenni Lenape trusted Penn, and they could even appear in Quaker courts, and be treated fairly under the law.
Well, after this outrage by Penn's sons, who got a group of Iroquois drunk to try to get THEM to sell the Penns additional land that the Iroquois
knew did not belong to them, that's what started the massacres on the frontier. A young pacifist Quaker relative suddenly moved, at age 18, to go fight Indians on the North Carolina border, which was about as far away from civilization as you could get in those days. So that's pretty persuasive circumstantial evidence that his parents were among the victims of these attacks. Well, along with the fact that his mother and father died in the same year, although they were about 15-20 years apart in age, and that was the year the son left PA for NC.
I found a lot of surprises. I had a couple ancestors who owned slaves. I had a couple other ancestors from Florida who fought for the Union in the cavalry during the Civil War. There was one ancestor who was born in 1776 in North Carolina, whose father had fought in the Revolution. His son fought for the South, but the father (then an old man, of course) remained a Union sympathizer. One of the slave owning relatives was killed by a former slave as he was en route to go collect his pension for having fought for the South in the war. A certain kind of justice, no doubt.
If you go far enough back, about 20 generations or so, one branch of our family tree ends with one of the bastard children of the historical John Bull, and was named for him, although no parents were listed on his birth certificate. "John Bull" became a symbol of Imperial England, much like 'Uncle Sam". But that version of the symbolic "John Bull" did not become popular until the early 1700s, after a series of newspaper political cartoons.
The original, historical John Bull was a composer and church organist. His claim to fame was that he was appointed the organist / composer for Queen Elizabeth I. He is the author of "God Save the Queen". It also turns out that Queen Elizabeth used him as a spy, and there are big gaps in his history - it's unknown where he was born, for instance (3 cities are listed as possibilities - 1 of which is the place where my bastard relative was born...).
John Bull used to like to take advantage of his position and power to deflower young teenage girls of noblemen, and had to flee England at one point, just ahead of the henchmen of one such enraged father. He wound up spending his later years in exile in Belgium, and the reasons why he couldn't return to England were shrouded in mystery. Well, except to a handful of angry fathers.
