Heritage is a trip. My grandmother was convinced she was a long-lost princess or some shit, mostly because she read two to three harlequin romances a day. Turns out her line through her dad, who was the Lost Dauphin in her head, traces back to a 1620 land grant in Virginia from King Charles I. Meanwhile the racist jew-haters come from down-on-their-luck Belgians. The woman my antisemitic Vassar-grad grand aunt idolizes married twice and got foreclosed on nine months after purchasing a dry goods shop. I grew up being told I was the mongrel of mongrels when in fact I've got the White Privilege Trifecta: Old 300 through one grandparent, Law of Return through another, DAR through a third. The ones that affected pretentious Harvard accents and looked down on everyone else are the Mudbloods. Census records prior to the Civil War tabulate the number of slaves in a household (for purposes of 2/5ths representation - how you like them apples). So far I hain't found none.
between Ancestry.com, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and a few other groups... finding one's roots is getting STUPID easy (and cheap/free) for most people of European descent. It's crazy how much information is out there, and they are cataloging it, linking it, and making it available.
Genealogy and family research is a trip. My dad's side is really straightforward; two farmer kids from Denmark met in the USA, got married, had kids. Their family were farmers in the Slesvig-Holsten area for many generations, with one minor change when they moved to the US of dropping the leading "Y" on the last name and going with the more modern/American "J" instead. My Mom's side was much more pompous... there's a signer on the Declaration of Independence with their last name (my middle name) that they claimed to be a relative.... but they aren't. And there was "George Washington's sword" held proudly by the family... until it turns out that there was a gimmicky thing the US Govt did where they handed out these things to people as tokens or honors, but they had nothing to do with Washington. That part of the family comes firmly from Scotland, with both Buchanan and MacGilivray blood well-established. So yeah. I'm a white northern european dude.