It’s been said many times but it can’t be emphasized enough, there are many different possible spelling variations of even the most common name. Names were written the way they sounded. And they sounded different depending on the listener’s background and education. Illiteracy was quite common. Birth dates were not written down but passed on verbally.
In my family with a fairly simple name I have found it spelled 5 different ways between City birth records, US Census records (actual image not extract), City/State marriage registers, Church burials and marriages, Church Cemetery records and finally the way the stone cutter chiseled it as “the final word”.!!
To know if you have the right person you have to tie in all the other anecdotal evidence.
Both the downtown library and the library one town over has access to Ancestry.
My library has access to a similar web site, but I can actually search there from my home PC, which is great.
It was Ancestry.com that gave me my first break though. I knew where my great-grandmother lived in 1900, and how old she was, but the name I had for her father was Caesar Lowe. I could even find records of her sisters’ marriages about the same time and place, but I could never find the family in the census. On ancestry, I was able to find the family with the mother’s name, and found out why I had so much trouble.
Great-great-grandaddy’s name was Julius Caesar Lowe. And grandma was listed as Stribble – that being her father’s mispronunciation of her given name!
While Ellis Island was the primary port of entry when it was in operation, I think it was possible to enter the country at some other point. Do you know when he came over? If it was before 1892, it probably isn’t in the Ellis Island records.
Some outfit is publishing an ongoing index to published immigration records. It’s now up to something like 15 volumes, and they keep adding a volume every year or so.
Probably Heritage Quest. They have a really poor search engine though. No soundex or metaphone or wild cards. But not bad getting the whole census for free at home 24/7. Well, if you neglect the taxes I pay that support it.
Also occasionally a family wasn’t home so the taker didn’t have time to come around again so he’d ask a neighbor for the information. We were looking for Nathan Beauchamp in the 1850 census for over 50 years to no avail. Then I finally found him listed as Nathan Buchanan. And I was only able to do that using Ancestry.com’s full name index and a search using only first names.
Alternatively, if you know where the person should have been, you can slog through the microfilm or whatever for that particular location. I’ve had to do that.