I have family members who have done a lot of research, it takes time and easy to get "false data" into your stories. I can go back 3-4 generations on my dad's side, but there was an adoption so hard to trace. On my mom's side, we trace back many generations coming to the US and back to Italy. I made some connections on an ancestry site (not based on DNA) that connected back many many generations, but I am not certain it is correctly linked to my ancestors.

On the DNA side, while I would not recommend it due to Chinese data mining and worse, I did do it and we found a previously unknow to us 1st cousin of my mom!