One of the things that does make it hard is that over this 5000 or so years the census takers in this county didn't do a very good job (imagine that, our government workers screwing things up). Some of the names were changed or misspelled by the census takers and that makes things much more difficult.
It's not just the census takers, it's the family members giving the information. They named themselves whatever name they were using at the time, at least with my relatives. If someone was known with a nickname, that's what they told the census people.
My wife is finding that in some cases the census workers didn't even get the race of the censed (is that a word?
) correct. One would think that this part of the questionnaire would be easy.