I'd suggest that the answer to Bill Tufts' question is really a question - how big do you want it to be? When most of us start working at our family trees, our concept of "genealogy" is rather different than what it can become. I set out to do a complete six-generation family tree including my children. I viewed that as an achievable, realistic objective. It took me about 20 months despite a long history and broad interest in genealogy within the various branches of my and my wife's families. And in the mean time I'd picked up several twigs that went back further than that. To put things in perspective, each set of your gg grandparents probably have about 1000 descendants (and their spouses.) So for 16 sets of gg grandparents, you're likely talking 15-20,000 descendants. Realistically, six generations will take you back to marriages in the mid-1800s (give or take perhaps 20 years, i.e., an ancestor who was the youngest child of a large family, etc.) And "reasonable" records (i.e., a paper trail you can trace,) are generally available for since that time, so the brick walls can be overcome with diligence and persistence. Based on my experience, completing the seventh generation which will take you back to people born about 1800) will take 1-2 times as long as it did to complete the first six generations, and you should be prepared to travel and breath a lot of dust if you want to achieve 90% + completeness. (By that I mean knowing all of your ggg grandparents' names, dates, etc.) My research suggests that your ggg grandparents probably will likely have 1250-2600 descendants (and their spouses.) So for 32 sets of ggg grandparents, you're likely talking about 64,000 descendants (if you could come close to finding them all.) In New Brunswick, you're likely to hit real barriers going back to the eighth generations. You may do it in some lines but the reality is that the paper records are going to get very scare!!!! If your ancestors were amongst the UEL settlers, you've still got a reasonable chance of success for this generation, but if they aren't UELs, you'll be tracing emigrants from a variety of countries, and many of the trails are stone cold!!!! NOTE: most people will also hit a language barrier after six generations in at least a couple of lines. It's hard enough to read the writing styles back then in English, let alone in some other language with which you are at best vaguely familiar. And don't forget that the level of education at that time was really pretty minimal for most people. So the answer to the question how big is your family tree now becomes "how high is your pain threshold?" for uou will be bashing your head against multiple brick walls by that point!!!!!