I have never done any researching myself. But a good friend, of blessed memory, was into genealogy, and he traced my mother's father's line, which is well recorded because it was mostly in the U.S. from before the Revolution. According to him, with one probable but not certain identification, I am descended from William Brewster, the pastor & leader of the Mayflower expedition.
My mother's mother's line also goes back a ways in the U.S., but her name was Magdalena Carolina Wilhelmina Augusta Oppermann, which makes it likely that her father belonged to the large German immigration to the Middle West in the mid 19th century.
Both my father's parents immigrated from what is now Poland about 1890. Efforts to trace their ancestry there have been frustrating. They took the pseudoGerman name Fineman on immigrating, as a bit of social climbing.