I think it's fun to "go back as far as you can" in genealogy. In fact, that's why most people get into it at first, to see if they can trace their lineage to someone famous a long time ago. Most of us get over that as we find there are so many more reasons to do research our ancestry! Like you said, now you're more interested in finding your living cousins. I've been working on that, too.
But when we do go way back, I think it's not very useful unless we have sources proving our relationship to those people. I mean, researching random individuals from long ago is fine... we call that "history". But it's not genealogy unless we're genetically related to them! Most people's trees they post online are totally unsourced, or they weren't very careful with their sources. Most trees are completely wrong, and contain almost entirely people that are unrelated, or people that never even existed. So when I see profiles going back to 1500 or even earlier, I have to wonder, is there any proof, or are they just having fun and letting their imaginations run wild?
RE: Genealogy: Gausfredo of Ampurias and Rosellon (d. Aft. 989)
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Genealogy: Gausfredo of Ampurias and Rosellon (d. Aft. 989)
While I always source what I have, I haven't always been careful about those sources. I'll accept any source if it seems plausible.
Having said that, I've reached a point to where I've gone back as far as I can given the info I could find at the time I was looking at that particular line. These days, I literally pick a name at random from the 90,000+ that I have and see what I can go find out about them including their children (which usually means my distant cousins) and try to add more thorough sourcing if it isn't already there. My starting point these days is FamilySearch.org because they have so much available for free (particularly census, birth, death and marriage records).
Anyway, I'll keep poorly sourced info (usually from some random family tree online with no sources) until I find a better source that either confirms or refutes it.
But getting back to 1500 (or further) isn't actually always very hard. If you have any obscure relation to royalty in your family tree then it becomes a breeze. I think lots of second, third, etc. sons of minor Earls and such came to the U.S. in the early days. Once you've found a link to one of those then it's easy to get back much further because you can be sure their ancestry is available.
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