My grandmother traced her family back to the 30 years war. No records after that. Churches are a very good source for that in Europe. That being said, I never understood the obsession with lineage.
This is like the Christian version of tracing your lineage back to when your lineage was a liability. If you're Jewish or have ancestry in the Balkans the dead end when all the old records were burned might be far more recent. It just happens that the wars of the 1500s and 1600s was the last time being the wrong kind of Christian was a big problem.
No harm, it's more that after a certain amount of generations the information becomes pretty irrelevant. You arbitrarily choose to follow certain lines (for prestige or historical significance) and necessarily disregard others. Going back to the 1600s, you descend in equal part from one lineage you mention and many thousand others which remain entirely unknown.