Evidently not all sources are acceptable. Government and military websites with people's names were not enough. I was asked for realworld non-internet documentation as "Those might have the same name but not be actual relatives". At that point I just gave up.
It sounds like you were doing original research: you were collecting evidence from primary sources (like rosters on military websites) and deriving claims (WP would call them "synthetic claims") from them. But Wikipedia is a tertiary source, not a secondary one: it's the job of books, journal articles, magazine articles, newspaper stories, and the like to present original research. It makes more sense if you understand encyclopedias the way Wikipedia does: as a sort of directory or survey of secondary sources, and little more than that.
Yes. I mean, getting your article published somewhere is even more effective, and WP is, with good reason, jaded about citing blogs (everyone who has ever wanted to spam WP has realized that they can claim a blog they wrote is a reliable source). But yeah, that's the system working.
We have a variant of that here! People want to control the titles of their submissions, but HN doesn't generally allow editorialized titles. But it will happily allow you to submit your own blog post about any subject, with any title you choose.
Note that if you're doing that (citing something you wrote) or really even doing what the other poster is saying (editing pages about a family member) you're subject to the conflict of interest policy too and need to disclose it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
