20 Generations is really quite an accomplishment, especially if you characterize yourself as merely “playing around” with the subject. I have been doing family research for over ten years and the furthest I can go back on any one branch is nine generations and for my particular ethnic heritage, that’s quite an achievement.
Recently I found a connection between my wife’s paternal grandmother to a family whose history had been documented in a 700 page book written in 1903. That family (Cheseborough, Cheesbro, Chesborough, and various other spellings) can be traced back to the arrival of the “patriarch” in 1630 along with the original boatload of Puritans who founded Boston Mass. and even further back by 100 years in Boston, Lincolnshire in England. I have not counted the generations.
Moreover, I can’t take credit for research done by the author of the above-mentioned book who did all of that research without tools like the internet, without the work done by the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints and without access to microfilm copies of the US and UK censuses and various public and church records.
As far as your relationship to this ancestor, you carry his genes and that is about it.
SRM