How far back can you trace your family tree?

With paper records, most people with roots in the United States or Western Europe can document their lines into the 1700s, and many lines reach the 1600s. Past that, it depends on where the family lived, whether they owned property, and whether the church books survived. Going further on paper usually takes a propertied or noble ancestor somewhere on the line.

The rest is why those dates fall where they do, what counts as normal, and what one line I'm researching in public looks like past 1800.

Why do most family trees stop in the 1600s or 1700s?

Because that is where the records that prove a parent-child link begin for ordinary people. Family history runs on three layers of paper, and each starts at a different point in the past.

The newest layer is civil registration, the government recording births, marriages and deaths. In England and Wales it began in 1837. In the Netherlands the whole population has been recorded in it since 1811. The United States had no universal mandate for vital records until the early twentieth century, and before that the records were spotty.

Under civil registration sit the church registers, the books a priest or minister kept of baptisms, marriages and burials. For most of Europe and the Americas these are the backbone of everything before 1800. The Dutch Genealogy blog finds that most Dutch lines can be traced to the 1600s, with church records usually reaching the 1600s or even the late 1500s. Genealogy Explained says many people can reliably reach the seventeenth century.

Under those sit court and town records, back to the 1400s or earlier in some places and the early 1600s in others. Before 1600, the Dutch Genealogy blog warns, you may find the name you're after, but the record rarely says enough to prove who was whose child. A name on a list is not a parent.

Two more things decide where a line ends. Money: wealthy people, property owners and nobles among them, left more records, and Genealogy Explained says an ancestor's race, social status or wealth could very likely determine whether they were documented at all. And loss: the FamilySearch wiki lists fires, floods and earthquakes among the reasons a Mexican register is gone.

How far back do church records go?

It depends on the country, and then on the parish, and the parish is what bites.

• England and Wales: church records go back to 1538, and civil registration began in 1837.
• Scotland: some church records reach back into the sixteenth century.
• Ireland: records typically span back to the 1800s, which is why Irish lines so often stop there.
• The Netherlands: the 1600s, sometimes the late 1500s.
• The Catholic world: in 1563 the Council of Trent formalized record keeping already practiced in much of the Church. In Mexico the Church was the primary record keeper until civil registration began, and FamilySearch's digitized Mexican collections start with baptisms in 1560, marriages in 1570 and deaths in 1680.

That is why Mexican lines are often the most reachable route to the 1600s; the specifics are in how far Mexican and Tejano family trees can go.

The catch is that a country's start date is a ceiling, not a promise. Your parish may have opened its first book a century late or lost the only one. The country tells you what is possible; the parish tells you what survives.

Is it normal to only get back to the 1800s?

Yes, and on some lines it is the correct answer, not a sign you've missed something.

Some of the reasons are the records. US vital records were not universally required before the early twentieth century, so a family can be thin on paper for a generation or two. Irish records mostly begin in the 1800s. Enslaved people were rarely recorded by name in government records before the Civil War. And in many places a mother's family was never written down, which the author of the Genealogy's Star blog counts as a practical end of the line.

Some are arithmetic. The Family History Guide calls it the sixth generation barrier. Count yourself as generation one, and a complete six-generation pedigree, the chart of your direct ancestors, holds 62 people and, unless someone married a cousin, 32 surnames. The writer's own sixth-generation ancestors were born between 1761 and 1829. "Back to the 1700s on every line" is 32 projects, and the number doubles with every step back. Cousin marriages shrink that count, which is the subject of what pedigree collapse is.

The same Genealogy's Star piece refuses to count a burned courthouse as a reasonable end to research, and I agree: a lost record closes one door, not the line. The true ends have no substitute, and the honest move there is to work another line. For the rest there is a method for going around the wall, in why you can't find your ancestors before 1800.

What does it take to push one line past 1800?

The clearest way to show what depth costs in documents is a line I'm working in public: the family of Padre José Nicolás Ballí, the priest who settled Padre Island in 1804. The Texas markers only guess at his birth year. The full log is on the case page; here is one line, read backward.

1829: the burial entry

The newest document is his burial, in the register of Nuestra Señora del Refugio in Matamoros, unindexed and uncited in any published source until I read the book page by page. It records a cause of death (apoplejía, a stroke) and one surprise. The date every history prints as his death date is his burial date; the register already calls him el finado, the deceased, five days earlier. It gives no age. That anchors the 1800s.

1828: the will

Eight months before he died he wrote a will, declaring himself in cabal salud, full health. The original went missing from the Matamoros archive decades ago, as the archive confirmed in September 2026; a typescript at the Texas General Land Office and a certified copy recorded in Cameron County in 1909 survive. In it he names his birthplace and his parents in his own words. That sentence is the proven link to the next generation up. It states no age.

1807: the signature

In the Reynosa marriage register, free online through the UTRGV Digital Library, he signed twice as interim priest in early 1807, spelling his own name both "Bally" and "Ballí" on the same page. A signature on a dated page proves he was ordained by then. Canon law set the minimum age for ordination at 24, which puts a documented ceiling on a birth year every account had only guessed at.

1798: his mother's will

The oldest document in the file is the 1798 will of his mother, Rosa María Hinojosa, in the Land Office's Spanish Collection. It carries a name from the generation above, a Nicolás Ballí, whom the researcher who indexed the Reynosa books independently identified as the Padre's grandfather. In my file that is a pointer, not a proven link, until a record ties the two together.

Before 1798: the wall

His baptism, the one record that would state his birth, was likely lost when a flood destroyed Reynosa in 1800. So the route runs around it. Canon law required a baptismal certificate before ordination, so his ordination file should hold proof of his age, and that file belongs in the archive of the Archdiocese of Monterrey. The archive's director has replied that it is open to the research but could not confirm the file survives. I don't know the answer yet.

What that line would cost

Map the documents onto my packages. The burial, the will and the signature are 1800s-package work: both sides back into the 1800s, from $2,500, with a 25% deposit of $625 to start. The 1798 will is what the 1700s package is for, from $5,500 and billed in four equal parts: at the start, when a line reaches 1800, when it reaches 1700, and on delivery. On this line the 1798 will would trigger the second payment; the third would not come due unless the Monterrey file turns up and leads somewhere. If it doesn't, billing stops at the last milestone reached and you keep everything found. Depth is a target, not a promise.

What about the 1500s, royalty and lines back to Adam?

The author of the Genealogy's Star blog puts the ceiling where I would. In Western Europe, information on individuals other than royalty is extremely scarce before 1000 AD, and the old royal pedigrees that online trees hang from are, for the most part, not substantiated.

So when someone sends me a tree that runs to 1200, my first question is which document proves each link past 1600, and the honest answer is usually that none does. That is the subject of whether you're really descended from royalty, and it is why I quote the 1500s and earlier case by case, after seeing the records.

How much does each depth cost?

I price by depth and by which lines you choose, not by the hour. Both sides back to about 1900 starts at $900. Both sides back into the 1800s starts at $2,500 and includes your case vault and private family website. One or two direct lines into the 1700s starts at $5,500. One direct line into the 1600s, about 12 generations with every link proven, is $6,500. The flagship, both sides into the 1600s, is $9,500, with $2,375 to start. The 1500s and earlier are quoted case by case. Each package is bought through the checkout, with 25% down to start or paid in full.

Every 1600s request begins with the $300 Discovery assessment, credited in full toward the package, because I have to see whether your parishes' registers survive before I quote. In the first week of any package I check feasibility; if a line can't realistically reach the target, you choose another line or a refund minus the assessment fee.

Here is the honest ledger on hiring. What a professional buys you is time and reading: books read page by page when the index misses a name, Spanish handwriting read in the original, and a record of every search, including the dead ends. What no professional can buy you is a book that flooded in 1800. Anyone who promises the 1600s before looking at your parishes is promising what the records haven't agreed to.

The tiers are laid out by depth, with what each includes and how it's billed. You can see where your own lines would land. See what each depth costs.