My ancestry

I have not always been that interested in the people from which I decended. However, a few years back the subject started to interest me. As I begain to dig into the past, I realized how closely I am tied to the Scotch/Irish people. Since both of these groups are primarily decended from the ancient Celtic tribes of europe I started to read more about thier customs and beliefs and found them very interesting.
One of my ventures to do some digging occured in 2004. After searching on the internet I found where some of my ancestors were buried. My paternal line came to Missouri in the mid 1800's from northern Virginia's Shenandoah valley. In the spring of 2004 I planned on going on 'The Run to the Wall'. Basically, Vietnam Vets riding to Washington D.C. to go to the Vietnam Memorial. I used this opportunity to try and visit the homeplace and gravesite of my great, great, great grandparents, near Strasburg Va. I contacted the landowner where the homplace and gravesite were located and made arrangements to visit. It was a rainey day when I arrived at the location south of Strasburg at a place known as Fischer's Hill.
One thing I found quite amazing was the old rock two story house. All of the wood had deteriorated but the stone walls were all intact and as solid and straight as the day it was built, in the early 1700's. As I visited with the landowner he asked me if i wondered why they had left that area, because it was so beautiful there. And it was. But I noticed the ground was littered with rock. A lot of the fences were made of the rock which had been gathered from the fields. And you will notice the rock fence around the family graveyard in the photo. Perhaps they had heard of better land to the west of them. That is one of the things I would like to know, but will probably never find out. Things like that are hard to come by when digging for information from the past. Not enough written family history!
The earliest I've traced my surname relatives is this period (1700's) in the northern part of Virginia. Many of the other branches in my family tree have been traced back much farther. Some to about 1000 A.D. in Scotland. I'm going to have to spend some time in Virginia to find out more information for the surname relatives. I do have some vague information that they arrived in this country in the late 1600's from Scotland. X.