<<Then we wonder why we can't find dear Uncle Joe Blow when it is indexed under Joe Blou, Blew, Bloo or whatever name they determined it looked like.>> I would hope that anyone doing any searching would use the Soundex rules and search for all names that have the same soundex value. I cannot remember all of them but you ignore vowels and double letters are two rules. For Irish names you should also search ignoring the Gaelic prefixes: Leary for O'Leary, Carthy for McCarthy etc. Beofer you too badly malign the transcribers, for the census, a lot of those "errors" are in the originals. When someone was not home it was common to get the information from the neighbors rather than walk/ride back later. The neighbors may well have guessed at a lot of the information. Also in the mid-19th Century, a lot of Irish still had a strong residual distrust of Government and English speaking "officials". And lying to an Englishman is not a sin covered by Irish morality. Mike McCarthy