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I just noticed this site on SE so I thought I would explore it. The question in my title is actually something I've wondered for years. Specifically, what I'd like to know is of all the people who have had their genealogy researched, and publicly published, what is the longest, verified genealogical line? How many ancestors does it extend and to what period of history does it start?

Is this question on or off topic?

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    Hi, sorry to be a party-pooper -- it's a fun question, but for a different venue. Welcome to G&FH.SE, and thanks for checking out Meta.
    – Jan Murphy Mod
    Commented Dec 30, 2014 at 20:50

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Per the help center topic: What types of questions should I avoid asking?:

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.

If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about ______”, then you should not be asking here.

In my opinion, this is a discussion question, not a solve-a-problem question. It also fails the criteria for good subjective questions which is listed farther down on the same page, where good questions

invite sharing experiences over opinions

The issue of whether something is 'verified' or not is also quite broad when you use it to refer to an entire lineage, rather than a single question of identity.

In an email posted on Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 4:07 PM to FHISO's TSC-Public mailing list, Elizabeth Shown Mills abstracted the main points of her Quicklesson 16: Speculation, Hypothesis, Interpretation & Proof into two essential concepts:

  1. Tracking property titles--not just for one piece of property but a whole street or a whole neighborhood--is often required to provide identity.
  2. Proving identity is the most basic element of genealogy.

Assume for the moment that we have a published genealogy which goes back twenty generations. We have to check that the identity of the parents and child are correct at each generation, which often means doing so for a lot of other individuals as well.

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  • Ok thank you. I didn't think it applied, but I wanted to be sure before giving up.
    – RLH
    Commented Dec 30, 2014 at 20:46

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