It's great that you help others with their genealogy works. It must be different in the US than here in Germany. Even today a lot of people don't live far from their place of birth and the registers in churches go way back.

But I remember how stumped my father was when he looked into his family's past. First wasn't difficult because they owned the same farm for centuries, but in 1770 a guy married the only daughter there who popped up from nowhere. To make it worse though there were three documents about him, his surname was written in three different ways (the last one is still the family name).

This was in the 80ies, before the internet. So he wrote to the parishes in the surrounding areas, one township after the other. And he got lucky - only 20 km away in a village one of the names was well known. It was on several of the inscriptions on the gable walls of the traditional half-timbered houses and one of them still belonged to the same family (well, more or less). And, as fate would have it, someone already had done the genealogy of this homestead. So my father got nearly 200 years of family history on some photocopied pages, dating back to "around 1595" :)

And now all the copies and the extracts from the church records and the civil registration offices are in a big envelope deep in my bookcase...