What you want to do is "start with what you DO know."

First, yourself and your husband -- dates, where born, etc.
Then, each parent in turn.

With this, if you're back to the censuses (1930), you can start working the families back in time. If not, you have to find the generation that was born before 1930.

Once you have more names and dates (I love the 1900 census, because it gives birth months and years -- even if it's "wrong" part of the time), you can start looking for marriage records, land records, tax records, newspaper articles, etc.

You may be able to get to the ggrandfather that way.

If you try to "work down" from Jesse's family, you'll get into a big mess.

Hope this helps.

Pat