Thanks, Tim.
WeCareALot, I will try to steer the thread back on-topic for you.
You can try chart rectification methods, and a detailed book on the subject is: Laurie Efrein,
How to Rectify a Birth Chart. I just checked amazon.com and apparently it is out of print, but may be available through used book sellers. The one in-print book on the topic seems to be:
Progressions Directions and Rectification by Zipporah Dobyns, Kris Riske and Jack Cipolla (2011.)
Another book that I highly recommend is Jodie Forrest,
The Ascendant. She focuses on the AS/DS axis as a whole, and looks at personality traits, vs. physical features. She is one wise and funny lady.
Also, member Alice McDermott (
www.aliceportman.com) recommends timing Uranus transits to major life-changes, as Uranus signifies sudden change. For example, for a sudden break-up with a partner, Uranus theoretically should be in the 7th house or hitting the cusp. I think you'd have to work with transits, and different types of progressions (secondary, tertiary, solar arc.)
You would want a solid working knowledge of planet, sign and house rulerships, as well as transits and progressions to attempt rectification.
I once worked with someone to try to rectify her birth chart. I found the tertiary progressions seemed to work the best for her in terms of date match-ups, but then we had no way of verifying it.
If you do think you can nail down your rising sign through chart rectification, then I would recommend you stick with a whole-signs house system. You would be lucky, indeed, if you could get your ascendant down to the degree, so it would be hard to have much faith in house cusps in the other methods.
If it were me, I would probably pay a professional astrologer to do the work, but you would need to come up with a list of key events in your life that do not relate to your age-cohort as a whole. For example, I would leave out high school graduation, but I would include something like a marriage or birth of a child (or something similarly momentous if you haven't experienced these.)
One thing I don't recommend is going by physical appearance. I empathize with your concerns, having: (a) an astrologer conclude Leo rising based on my appearance, (b) deciding through rectification that I had an early degree of Libra rising, and then (c) finally learning that I have a late degree of Virgo rising!
While I think my rectification wasn't a lot of degrees off the mark, it did change my rising sign completely.
Let's take Virgo rising. I have a lot of Virgo's critical discernment and sense of perfectionism (in certain areas), but these could just as easily be explained by my having another planet (Saturn) in Virgo. One thing I do
not have is Virgo Rising's tidy appearance or sense of organization. A neat-freak I am not.
When I did find my unofficial birth certificate (issued by the suburb where my parents lived when I was born,) it also put Uranus on my MC closely squaring my ascendant. With this configuration, there is no way that my clothes or hair could look well put-together. The moral of the story is that a planet in a rising sign or aspecting the ascendant degree can really modify one's physical appearance.
Speaking of hair, supposedly Aquarius rising or Uanus in the first house can give the person "unusual hair." My hair still doesn't cooperate, but it was extremely "unusual" when I was very young, both colour and texture. Complete strangers used to ask me if it were "real." But Uranus was working from somewhere else in the birth chart, and it can be very hard to determine the ascendant just on the basis of physical appearance.
One last thing you might try (based on Jodie Forrest's book) is on those painful occasions when someone criticizes you directly and personally, how do they describe you? More like an Aries? ("You only think about yourself!") Or more like a Taurus ("You're so stubborn!")
And then so much of one's physical appearance is based upon genetics. In Days of Yore, before geneticists had worked out human genes, it was easy to say that an Aries rising or Mars in the first meant a ruddy complexion or red hair, simply because Mars is the "red planet." These descriptions were also based upon European colouring, not on folks from Asia, Africa, &c.
Good luck with this.