A website like this may be fine for tracing recent history but once you get past a few hundred years or so I wouldn't think they would have accurate or complete records. Your best bet may still be doing it the old way of traveling around to different places to look at their records. You may have to go to Boston or something to look at your relative that fought in the Revolutionary war or something. My dad did a ton of research and he had to travel to France to look up some of our ancestors (granted, these ancestors were from around the 1000's). That way he was able to learn more about our oldest ancestor with the same surname (Mauger) and then back to Robert I, the first Duke of Normandy (otherwise known as Rollo). Now that method may not always be the best because it is time consuming and not cheap. Fortunately for us, since Robert I was a historical figure, we were able to use historical archives on the internet to find out that Robert was a member of the Norwegian royal family and with that knowledge, we were able to trace the family back to 1200BC. Using Norwegian and Ancient Greek records and myth (well it is called myth by historians because they don't know if it is accurate or not because of the age but there is more evidence to support this family tree than there is to disprove it), the family traces back to Memnon, the king of Ethiopia during the Trojan War. Memnon then marries the daughter of the king of Troy and they have a son named Tror, which is commonly translated into Thor and this individual is who the Norse god is based off of. I highly encourage everyone to learn about their family history because you can really find out some interesting information about your ancestors, and also learn about the migrations of people.