Remember to look for military records for ALL the male members of your family.  Your many great grandfather may not have served in the American Revolution but if his brother did his records may tell you more about the family.

Do an inventory of the men in your family.  If you have RootsMagic you can make it run a report for you.  Check to see if your genealogy software lets you do custom reports.  You can decide if you want to do a particular line in your family or do a complete inventory looking any ancestor who might have served.

If you don't use genealogy software OR your program will not do this, Excel is the next best choice. 

If you don't have Microsoft Office but you have a Google account you can use Google docs.  Sign in and pull down the choice at the top of the page that says more.  Choose documents.  Create a new spreadsheet.  The bad news is you have to type everything in.  The good news is you have this list anytime you need it when you have an internet browser up!

an inventory list needs to (at the minimum) show:

Name   -  birth year (which can be estimated)  where they lived:

 

a report from a genealogy program that shows these fields or a spreadsheet will then let you play with the data and sort it by name or year or place.  If you are having to retype the data into a spreadsheet you may want to keep it simple but in a list generated by your genealogy program a spouse is a nice addition to the list.

If you sort your candidates by their birth year you can then determine where to look for signs of service
 

In early America men 16-60 had to show up for militia duty.  When actual wars broke out  they could even be slightly younger or slightly older than this framework so if the person is borderline at least check for them.

With this list consult the TIMELINE

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                                                 Anne Livingston   @WVC Library