Indeed with a name as popular as ours it is really hard to nail down. From personal experience it has taken me over 25 years to make a headway. I started on Ancestry.com and with parent's, grandparent's and great grandparent's names I received a bunch of hints. Then I would double check with my grandmother and great uncle who were still alive at the time. Then I found familysearch.org a few years ago. They have source materials for free, whereas ancestry you have to pay for to get access to it. Then ultimately I stumbled onto Wikitree trying to verify and find more sources for family members. It is very time consuming to say the least but it is fun putting pieces of puzzles together. I too am a veteran and dealing with a genetic autoimmune disease which has made me disabled and drove me to delve deeper into genealogy. All the big name sites like ancestry, 23&me and so on have DNA testing. Even if you have a free ancestry account you will get DNA results back. That is what I have done. It does help you in finding others who have matching sequences as you do. It may give you more to work with. However linking it to Wikitree and dnaportal.com will give you plenty of information. Some things on dnaportal are a paid service but it still offers a lot of information. Just start small and keep researching on as many sites as possible, that will help you build source material for Wikitree! Hope this helps...