[renormalised (Carl)]

Mostly....although I knew the first 5 generations of my family (that's back to my G-G Grandparents). All the information I gathered from then on was on the net....downloaded old books, pedigrees, manorial records, parish records, wills and probate records, government documents, final concords, pipe/court/cartulary rolls etc etc. If I found another site that had the info I wanted, like another person's genealogy, I'd use their info and then go look up what they had plus more of my own. There's plenty of info out there, especially on the genealogy sites like ancestry.com, familysearch.org etc. However, like anything else, you have to be discriminating and check everything. There is a lot of misleading stuff floating around, but you get to know how to navigate around and identify that stuff after awhile.

It's easy enough to start tracing out your family. All you have to do is start with yourself and then your parents. You'll most likely even have records of your grandparents lying about as well. Most states usually have records of births, deaths and marriages going back to the mid 19th Century or earlier (NSW goes back to 1788), so you'll find a few generations more in that info. Then you have the immigration passenger lists and such to find where your overseas family came into the country and where they might be from. After that, it's just time and patience (and a measure of luck as well) to find everyone else. If you're lucky enough to find someone of note in your family or connected to an important family (like I have), then you can go a long way.