I am Chris Jones, and I started my own family history research with the benefit of having my mother's family tree largely delivered. You may think that was not a difficult job. My mother's family all originated from Ireland, and pre-1922 a lot of family history documentation is either missing or was destroyed in the fire at the Great Courts in Dublin. This event was compounded by the destruction of the census records between 1831 and 1891 due to a misunderstanding between the nascent Irish government and their predecessors in London. Both were convinced that a copy of these records had been stored in London. So Irish family history research is to say the least, challenging.
Fortunately, for me my grandmother's family history was charted by a cousin who spent many months researching the Irish records that were left while her husband worked in the Guiness brewery in Dublin, developing alcohol-free beer perversely.
This wealth of history, prompted me to look into my father's family history, some of which I found to be relatively easy, bearing in mind that my family name is Jones, and my grandmother's maiden name was White, two of the most populous family names in England today. I discovered that the Jones tree was easily traced using a family bible and the services of an Ancestry subscription which gave me access to English census records and what are called BMD (Birth/Marriage/Death) records. Interestingly, I found that my great great grandfather had actually been born in North West Wales, and there my research came to a grinding halt, until I worked out what Patronymics really meant - until about 1841, particularly in North West Wales, the system of naming in families used the Patronymics system where the son or daughter takes their father's christian name as their surname. In my gg grandfather's case he was christened John Jones, and his father was John Richards.
My grandmother's family was somewhat easier, apart from the fact that her maiden name was White, another common English surname. Again I was able to go back relatively easily through to the early 1800's, discovering on the way that my great grandfather had built Clanricarde Gardens in Notting Hill - his profession was a property developer, and he built all of his own family homes (three or four so far as I am able to tell), as well as following his retirement from property development, he ran a public house for a few years. One of his sons, the only one of his children whom I actually met, was the sole importer of Russian caviar into the UK for many years before his retirement.
Having gone back to the late 1700's on my immediate family, just using internet resources, I then did more research on my wife's family, and also on my sister's husband's family. The result of this is that now I have five trees that I try to keep up to date on Ancestry, one each for my parents, one each for my wife's parents and one for my sister's husband's family.