So I get patrons all the time who swear up and down that their ancestors only spelled their name one particular way. I always tell them as I tell all patrons that I help, “If they can misspell something, they will”. I always recommend that patrons try every name variation they can come up with and then try searching the first part of the name with an * after it to catch any other spellings they might have not thought of.
Sometimes it wasn’t always the fault of whoever was recording the census, or the deed, or the marriage record. Sometimes the person themselves may have used different variations. My great-grandfather Jerome was one of those folks, his name is different on almost every record I have on him. Sometimes he said his name was Jerome, others it was Jarome and then the deeds that have Jay Rhone. Of course sometimes the name on the record is correct but it was transcribed wrong. I had a lot of trouble finding this same great-grandfather in the 1930 census, even though I knew the family including my grandfather had lived in the same area for many years. Eventually I just searched page by page in the census and found them. Their last name of Kimberly, had been transcribed as Kirnbesly. I would have never come up with that variation as it was so far out there. Even if your last name is Smith, don’t forget it could be Smyth, or Smythe. If your name is very unusual then you may just have to insert and take out different vowels to see what someone might have come up with. Our modern search engines do a decent job of catching some of these variations, but they don’t catch them all. So the next time you can’t seem to find an ancestor, you might see if it all comes down to spelling.
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