A Character's Genealogy: Introduction

I have family members who are super interested in researching the genealogy of our relatives. My sister will sometimes watch "Who Do You Think You Are?" where celebrities track down the roots of their families and find all kinds of interesting revelations. My dad- he's a bit of a skeptic, believing these shows are staged for dramatic effect, companies like Ancestry.com are scams, and logically, you can only trace back your genalogy so far until it's guesswork.

What are my thoughts?
It's kinda interesting, I guess. I'm not super obsessed with my family's history and I'd seen some of these shows (in the event they feature a celebrity I'm particularly interested in).

The funniest part is that I fell into this for one of my characters over a random reason: 
Jonas lives with his guardian and I started brainstorming a way to explain how he had no living relatives to live with after his parents died in a tragic car accident.
Then I started scribbling ideas from what little I remember from Social Studies, bits of my family's history and "It's a Wonderful LIfe" and I wound up with some fun ideas. Although I may have reached a point where I may have to do research to fill in the blanks, should I wish to make proper short stories out of them. 

It's also been fun recently re-reading over my old notes and finding stuff I forgot I'd written.
I remembered the business with "Mr. Potter" and "Mr. Bailey" but little else beyond Jonas's parents meeting in college and Peter facilliating their relationship- hence the godfather/guardianship role he has later on. 

So this is what I'm thinking: 

I'll work over the the next few weeks typing up what I have in my notebook and sharing what I have so far in a series of posts. Then maybe at the end I'll add a question section. Things I'm not sure about from certain time periods, what I could potentially build on and so forth. 
And if that means I'll have to do more research the next time I go to a library, so be it.

Another thing I'll probably have to do is give the people in this family tree names or at least codenames. Because not all of them have that and I can only go so far with monikers like grandfather, brother, and so on.