Patience, patience, patience. All of this work takes a long time (i.e., years) to pull together. All you can do is keep collecting information until you have enough to formulate a preponderance of evidence on what your line is. It will take looking at a variety of records. Don't let anyone tell you that you have to be 100% certain beyond any reasonable doubt and can't look further back until you are 100% sure. (If you get stuck on that standard, you'll remain in the 20th century forever since you weren't there to witness the births.) Anyone that tells you that their information is right, and that's it--watch out for those researchers because if they think that way, they are not keeping an open mind to entertain any new discoveries, such as probate records etc. or something else that might surface that doesn't happen to agree with what you have found already. Not all records agree. In fact, usually there is discrepancy in records. Some of the most obvious records that are often wrong: birth certificates, death certificates (frequent!), head stones (more often than you would imagine), and the list continues. All you can do is collect all of the records that you find and keep comparing them. Just because you can pin something on a "primary" record--big deal, what if that "primary" record is incorrect? And it often is. The research job is never over, and the family tree is never done. Send for all the obituaries that you can find. Collect all of the known information you can find, and keep comparing and refining, until you have a number of things pointing a certain way. In the meantime, don't stay stuck. Search out the suspected lines, then study the descendants of those lines, and then get clues from that. Also, don't take word on published genealogies, I don't care how old they are. Keep an open mind that someone could have been incorrect 100 years ago, and often they were. You can only do your best, and no genealogy is perfect. We are not running a science experiment here, only trying to find clues and good leads until the point we are fairly satisfied that we are correct.