For me anything before about 1750 is pretty murky and the records are harder to find and confirm
My Irish side only goes back to the late 1700s/early 1800s, but I’ve been able to trace the German and English sides back a bit further than that. The problem, especially with the Irish side, is that names keep being reused, so I’ll have Robert James had a son named Robert, who had a son name James, who had a son named Robert James. It just gets really confusing.
It’s even worse when there’s another Robert James in the next village who married their village’s Mary Smith and all their 10 kids are also named any possible combination of these 4 names.
And you only realise it because one Mary Smith can’t have 2 Robert James (Jr.) a month apart.
Yup! Also, my last name was spelled differently and was apparently pretty common, so that makes it even more confusing.
I have one where the husband and wife had the same last name before marriage, but were unrelated. Threw me for a real loop there as I thought I couldn’t find her maiden name until I figured it out. Definitely a lot of ancestors changing the spelling of last names. Some I can’t tell if it was intentional, or just hard to distinguish between a’s and o’s on the old documents.