Most of my ancestors immigrated to North America in the latter half of the 19th century. However, ~5% of my ancestry traces to American colonists at the time of the Revolutionary War, mostly in New York. (They were “Loyalists” and fled to Canada at the end of the war.) The family stories only go back to about the time of the Revolutionary War, but if you go to these online genealogy pages, and search for the names and dates that I have, you can find people connecting my ancestors all the way back to the original Dutch colonists of New York (not yet called New York then) in the 1620s. In fact, if you believe these folks, then I’m a direct descendant of Sarah Rapelje, the first European girl born in what’s now New York state:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_RapeljeAccording to that Wiki page, that also makes me a distant cousin of Humphrey Bogart. You can find another ancestry line for my English ancestors that supposedly has a common ancestor with the Wright Brothers way back in 1500 or so.
And then there are the folks who claim to be able to take some of these ancestry lines all the way back to Charlemagne. If you take this stuff seriously, then I have multiple paths of ancestry back to Charlemagne, at least one through my English ancestors and one through my Dutch ancestors. This also takes you through various Counts of both Flanders and Holland, including Arnulf I of Flanders and Floris I of Holland.
