My father's side of the family goes back into Georgia into the late 1600s and very early 1700s. They escaped England so they could worship ALmighty God as they saw fit. From their they literally spread across the nation, north and south...east and west.
My mother's family came from eastern Europe (Slovak Republic area) in the mid to late 1800s, and her father came from Austria right around the turn of the century. They escaped despotism and persecution and poverty to find a new life in America. They were successful.
Both families sacrificed life's blood in defending freedom and this nation.
The contention that somehow it is wrong to take pride in these things is ludicrous. I guess it depends on what a person is looking for and what they want to hold up.
In one branch of my family I found an interesting chain. A famous Lord Mayor of London whose father was a great West Indies Plantation owner who was one of the largest slave owners in the new world. Within about five generations he had a decendent of the same name that was an acquaintance of John Brown and was accused of being one of the Pottowatome raiders.
An example, we had all these folks who used Revolutionary War warrants to acquire land in the Ohio Valley ~ but none of them were quite old enough to be veterans of the war, and none of them had a father or grandfather who was in the military to earn the warrants.
So, where did they get them if they didn't buy them (also a common practice but there was no evidence they'd purchased them from a vet or vet's family).
Eventually we found they'd had cousins, brothers, uncles and other close relatives, but not direct ancestors, in the Maryland 400 ~ which saw 256 of its number dead at the end of a battle in Brooklyn where they covered George Washington's evacuation to safety. They literally saved the Revolution.
http://www.somdnews.com/stories/053106/entefea173542_32080.shtml