If you are having difficult thinking spelling variants for your last name, remove vowels or change each vowel with another one. Vowels are the letters most likely to be the cause of spelling variants. Neil easily gets spelled as Neal, Hull as Hall, etc.
There's other letters that can be a problem, but vowels are a good place to start
It can also be helpful to substitute a "?" (question mark) for a vowel when searching census records, etc. This gets you any variant in the index that has your name with various vowels, or occasionally consonants, in that spot.
ReplyDelete