Hello! I'm new here, and a little confused about some aspects of genealogy. I started researching my family tree within the last month. I started by going off of what I knew already, and Facebook/general Googling helped (obituaries and such). This weekend, I talked to my parents to help me fill in as much as they knew (with help from death certs and papers saved throughout the years).

A few full names, birth and death dates were SUPER helpful when I came home to Google. I was able to find other family trees that other people have made that go back to England in the late 1500s/early 1600s (on my dad's maternal side). One question I had was, how much can you trust those other trees? For example, my great-great-grandmother's name was Jane Doe (let's pretend), and she was married to John Dough (let's say). I found quite a few trees with those names listed as husband and wife, with the years they were both born and died. Those trees also allowed me to go back much, much further than what I had information for. Is it safe to say the lineage is fairly accurate (as it could be), given my starting points of Jane Doe/John Dough? 

When making your own family trees, do you include siblings of those in your direct line? If the trees I found are fairly accurate, I can go back to the 1600s or so. Many of those people had 9+ children, and their kids had 9+ children, and so on! Is there a certain point when you stop including siblings and cousins? I feel like I'd have to figure out the descendants of *everyone*, and I don't know if that's how it works. I have siblings included for all the grandparents, and even my father's grandmother, but I don't know if I should try to go beyond that. Like I said, if those trees I found previously are as accurate as they can be, siblings are already listed, so it's really a matter of copying and pasting on my end, but...I feel like the tree gets super complicated?


Sorry if these questions are confusing!