The restoration is described in the movement's own sources as a sequence of specific events, in specific places, with dates. It begins with what Latter-day Saints call the First Vision, which Joseph Smith reported as an appearance of God the Father and Jesus Christ in a grove of trees near his family's farm in Palmyra, New York, in the spring of 1820. He first wrote an account of it in 1832 and gave several more over the following decade; the differences between those accounts, in emphasis and in what is described, are a matter of real scholarly discussion and the church has published its own essay acknowledging them.
The conferral of authority is placed later and is described as physical. Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery said that on 15 May 1829, near Harmony, Pennsylvania, John the Baptist appeared to them as a resurrected being and conferred the Aaronic priesthood by the laying on of hands; that Peter, James and John afterward conferred the Melchizedek priesthood; and that in the Kirtland Temple on 3 April 1836 Moses, Elias and Elijah delivered further keys, Elijah's being the sealing authority on which the temple ordinances depend. Those events are the warrant for everything the church now does, which is why they are recited in ordination lines and taught in the first months of a convert's membership.
The atlas records what the movement claims and the dates it gives, and does not adjudicate the claims. What is not in dispute is that the sequence, as told, is the constitutional history of a church of about seventeen million people.