I traced my paternal line backwards as far as I could go with family remembrances, family bibles and other birth and death records. Through all the trees and a lot of dead ends I finally came upon one particular relative (my 5great grandfather I believe) who had a very unique name-Bedford Addison Foster-, but could get no further. So I googled, and Binged, and Yahooed his name with and without quotations marks around it (without separates each individual name while with quotations marks makes the search look for those three names in that specific order together) and lo and behold found not just one, but three, BAF the first, second and third, and very flush trees for each of them going both ways. Turns out my tree connected to BAF the first and I could follow that several more generations backward from there through someone else's work. If you have a family name clan website try to see if they have a geneology search function there. Once you find out information, try county records for birth, death, marriage, taxes, land ownership, etc., documentation that may help you. The further back you go the sketchier and more colloquial some of the "official" documentation actually becomes, but just using these tools I have traced my line back to my 11th great grandfather who supposedly is the one who came across the pond and settled with a land grant in Virginia back in the late 1600s. I am still tracing grave and birth and marriage records, as well as a listing of ships manifests, to find what ship he arrived on and exactly when, and from where, to try to make the definitive link up to "the old country", but feel confident that with these resources I will eventually succeed. If I run into road blocks then ancestry.com and geneology.com will become additional references, along with Y-chromosome DNA analysis and comparison to an ongoing project of my surname that is already in place on both sides of the ocean. There is no end to the amount of potential information available out there, if you just start looking. Dive in.

Good luck

jeff