Ancestors and History

I recently signed up for six months of Ancestry.com, and I'm learning lots of interesting things from it. I'm finding people in my family tree who were around for major historical events, which has piqued my interest in lots of different things.

For example, I discovered ancestors who came over on the Mayflower. This isn't really an era of history I've paid a ton of attention to (aside from the forced, one-sided, likely-racist reenactments shoved down our throats at Thanksgiving every year), but now I'm looking more into it.

Apparently this Stephen fellow is my ancestor.

Historical topics are a lot more interesting when you consider that someone whose blood you share was actually involved. I traced my lineage even farther back and ended up discovering Empress Matilda. I had never heard of her before, but reading her Wikipedia article, I'm intrigued. She sounds pretty awesome. I've actually bought a book about her, as well as about the Plantagenet line, and I mean to read both of them over the summer.

I do wish I could get deeper into other branches of my family tree. My Ancestry subscription is called "world traveler," but that couldn't be more misleading. When I get into the parts of my lineage that were in Germany or Italy, I hit dead ends. Can't find a thing. It's really unfortunate. I'd like to connect to those branches of my tree, as well.