[dionidium]

> And maybe I can trace my family back to the 1600's?

This is totally off topic, but I recently came across a bunch of information about my family tree that totally changed my perception of this. By the time you get back this far you're talking about literally tens of thousands of living ancestors. I had always heard my family came here at the end of the 19th century, but it turns out some of them were already here in the 17th, because, again, this far back you're talking maybe 20,000 people. It's not the, like, 8-10 ancestors whose names you know from 1900.

All it takes is for one of those thousands to have set up here and at some point for one of their descendants to have procreated with somebody in your ancestral line, who maybe came here much later for it to be true that your ancestry here technically goes back to whenever they first got here.

Exponential growth surprises, yet again.