My wife and I have been independently researching each of our families. If one of the links I found is correct, I've got a Scots line going back to Robert the Bruce and a possible English line going back to 13th Century Cornwall. The rest of it is quite uneventful Danish, German, and Irish. My wife's side, however, has Civil War vets on both sides, 7 or 8 Revolutionary War vets, and an eccentric great-great-great-great uncle that joined the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears.

We've found quite a number of 14 year old brides and kissing cousins, but nothing else particularly tawdry so far. We both have a lot of ancestry in Tennessee and the Carolinas in the 18th and 19th centuries, but no slave owners that we have been able to determine.

We use Ancestry.com quite a bit, and my wife and her mother have also done some hands-on records research in county clerks offices and the like. The stuff on Ancestry is interesting, but a lot of it is unverified fantasy (like my Robert the Bruce reference).