Family Heritage Questions

I have been conducting some research that traces my family lineage. It is extremely tedious, but rewarding work. I started this search over three years ago, but I dropped the ball because I kept hitting dead ends. What I've learned is that cousins and aunts and uncles have a ton more information than I thought they would. And now, three years later, my family tree is getting really big! Like a live tree, it's fun to watch it grow.

There are many great websites that assist in the discovery of relatives and ancestors, but once I got going, I realized that I had saved quite a bit of information on my own. For instance, this morning I located an audio recording on cassette tape of my mother in law telling Brad about when she traced their roots back to Stockholm, Sweden. She even found a family grave site near Stockholm, when she stayed there with relatives.

Again it was a cousin that hosted my mother in law. The relation was that her mother was a cousin of my mother in law's great grandmother. The cousin's name was Eva and it turned out that Eva had a doll named after my mother in law, Corinne. Corinne and my sister in law took the trip to visit Sweden in 1984.

What I am wondering is... How long has our family been here in the U.S.? Many of my ancestors have been here in the U.S. for quite a long time, which makes it easier to trace our roots. I've recently discovered my ancestors have roots that date back to the Civil War time. Now I'm thinking that I may have had relatives here during the birth of our great nation. I recently discovered that Brad has a relative who is buried at Arlington National Cemetery!