I’ve been working on a couple of challenging NSDAR applications this month and have found how many times people on the internet perpetuate incorrect data. One thing that the NSDAR genealogy course teaches is that if they were born in KY, then their parents had to be in KY at some point, preferrably when their child was born. If you don’t find them there, then you probably have the wrong person. Also, being born in PA and you find a person with that name on the Pennsylvania Historic and Museum commission’s list of soldiers in Pennsylvania, that this is your ancestor. You need to keep looking, READING, and do the math. If you have a picture of a tombstone from Findagrave and the date of death on the stone says 1833, then he couldn’t possibly be writing letters in 1883. This isn’t rocket science folks, just simple math– 1883 comes after 1833.
NSDAR will tease all of this out of the documents you provide. As an applicant, you can do this too, you just need to reason it out as to time and place. If you put down a date or place, do you have a document to prove it? I liken it to being an agent on NCIS or CSI. You don’t have the blood and guts, but need the reasoning power.