I requested a form to have this done. It asks for the home village of emigration. I have not been able to locate the exact village my grandparents came from in what is now Slovakia. Would a record search be fruitless without the village. You should send off the search by answering the other items on the form.
Many cultures often keep family records.
Koreans, for instance, have a designated person who will record the names of new family members in a book, with which one can look back many generations. There is an organization called Avotaynu, the Jewish community is one of the best organized in the U.S. for tracing Jewish roots. They have a Web site. BTW, a lot of the recommendations I'm making involve people who are at the Cincinnati conference with me, so give them a few days to respond. He lived in the south.