Where do the roots end?

[pinefamily]

I still live in hope to one day find the maiden name of Sarah Coombs. I shall keep trying. Her first hubby was from Dorset. She died just a few weeks before the 1851 census. I found an 1810 marriage in Axminster but the bride was not a spinster, she was a widow, so if the marriage is right, she'd have to be a very young widow as she was born c1790. I shall never give up on this.

Don't discount a young widow. With the help of a good friend, I cracked a brickwall similar to yours. My widowed ancestor remarried at age 33 to my ancestor. Found the first marriage, but still looking for the first husband's burial. Can't expect it too easy I suppose.

[Vance Mead]

I don't know if these have been mentioned previously but, after you have looked at all the parish records and wills, these are the records I would check for the 16th century:

Manorial court records
Lay subsidies (1520s and 1540s)
Muster rolls (1520s to 1540s)
Common Pleas and Kings/Queens Bench
http://www.uh.edu/waalt/index.php/Main_Page
http://aalt.law.uh.edu/Indices/CP40Indices/CP40_Indices.html
http://aalt.law.uh.edu/Indices/KB27Indices/KB27Indices.html

Original legal records here:
http://aalt.law.uh.edu/

Also
http://www.medievalgenealogy.org.uk/index.html
http://www.medievalgenealogy.org.uk/sources/olmed.shtml
https://www.british-history.ac.uk

Some of these, such as manor court records and lay subsidies, are not online and would require a trip to the county records office or the National Archives.

[Redroger]

And don't forget Star Chamber. A person with my surname was involved in sheep rustling in the 16th century. Must be a connection my great grandfather's brother was transported in 1832 for Highway robbery! Makes him an aristocrat in Australia!

[Vance Mead]

To answer the original question, a lot depends on what sort of people they were. For the middling sort of people - husbandman, yeoman, butcher, baker - the limit is probably about mid-15th century, using the records I mentioned above. If they were landowners - gentry, squires, knights - it might be possible to go back to about mid-13th century, using records having to do with with feudal landholding.

It's all a matter of luck, of course, whether records for any particular person for family might be found.

[ThrelfallYorky]

I think that the point where the roots end are where you start to clutch at really thin straws, and weave them into a fragile structure that's likely to fall apart as soon as any strain is put onto it - several trees related to one of my families happily clatter back from a 1717 Lancashire marriage that was fact, "tracing" the line way back into the 1300s on what I'd say is almost no evidence at all.... they make things - people, dates, relationships "fit", often abandoning all commonsense or practical biology ( father aged 6, anyone? ) merely stringing together the "right" surnames in the same locality, to form a parody of a pedigree.
I'd love to accept these wonderful lines - but I can't, as there isn't any proof of who was the father of the groom in that marriage. Wer know he married, who he married, and when he died - and nothing further back. I've tried for years, and there are several likely chaps, but I suspect I'll never manage to prove anything, so....
The roots end here!

[Redroger]

It's all a matter of luck, of course, whether records for any particular person for family might be found.
[/quote]
It is indeed. I have a massive wall in the late 18th century about my 2 great grandfather.
If I can prove who I think he wascl then I am straight back to around 1300AD when his ancestors took the tenancy of a farm in Dorset and kept it for the next 500 years. Luck indeed!!

[pinefamily]

Similarly for me, Roger. My Pine/Pyne line can be confidently traced back to the mid 1500's in Ottery St Mary Devon. Oh but for the destruction of Devon wills in 1942 I might have been able to connect to the family of East Down and Upton Pyne, whose earliest ancestor was in the mid 1100's.
Too many John Pyne's around in the 1500's to be certain.