The census is pretty much the bread and butter resource for finding your family. Sometimes they are not where you expected to find them. Sometimes they're in the place you expected, but you can't find them because the enumerator had such awful handwriting that the indexer didn't get the name right. When the name isn't spelled correctly or interpreted correctly when indexing, the family might not be found in a search.
My Walsh ancestors were well hidden until I was looking for one of the sons rather than the parents, and there they all were. Everyone's surname was Walsh but for reasons I'll never understand, the parents' surname was interpreted as "Naesh" and the children were "Walsh". I don't mean to chastise someone who had voluntarily undertaken the task. But if a group of people are all at the same address you would think that if the surnames looked similar they must be the same. In this particular case, only the father's surname was written and his wife and children's surnames were indicated with ditto marks. That did not deter the indexer from transcribing the parents as Naesh and the children as Walsh.
Other folks are there and the surnames are ALMOST correct yet they are not found in a search. In the case of the Fennell family the name was spelled with only one final letter 'l'. However, the person doing the indexing thought the last letter was 'e' instead, resulting in a pronunciation of "Fennie". I only found the family in browsing the entire listing for Elizabethtown (Brockville), while looking for someone else.
