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BY DALE FUNSTON

A researching German ancestors, I have grown accustomed to the di culties surrounding the various ways German surnames can be spelled. O en times, the original German name is spelled phonetically in records and becomes “Americanized” over the course of time. Researching my great-grandfather, however, has been one of those di cult cases, and in this one, other facts about his life have proven to be more valuable than the spelling of his family name.

I began my search of the census indexes at Ancestry.com by entering every conceivable spelling combination of Shapel. I received a lot of hits, but the ages or given names never seemed to match.

I scoured the Internet and various message boards for possible matches and ran across a potential sibling, Emil Schaple, born in 1855 and living in Elmira a er 1880. But I still couldn’t nd a record of Robert, Hooker, or even Emil in Elmira.

I started to think that I was looking in the wrong place. Was it possible that the family did not immigrate to the U.S. until a er 1870? All of the other evidence I had indicated an immigration in the 1850s. I refused to give up.

My great-grandfather Robert and his brother, Hooker, used the name Shapel since moving to Allen County, Kansas, around 1878. According to a family source, they lived in Elmira, New York, prior to the move. Many records exist for the Shapel family in Kansas, but I could nd absolutely nothing about their time in New York. I suspected that the family name used in New York was some variation on the name Shapel, and I already knew that Shapel could show up as Schaeple, Schobel, Schappel, and Shoeball.

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I wanted proof that the family really hailed from Elmira, so I decided to focus my e orts on nding the Shapels in a U.S. Federal Census for Elmira, New York—either 1860 or 1870.

I went back to searching the census indexes, this time with a di erent approach: I le o the surname and searched the index for the more uncommon given names of Hooker and then Emil. Zero hits. However, when I searched for “Robert” in the 1860 census for Chemung County, New York, I received 156 hits. I narrowed down the results to six hits by entering the estimated birth year as 1860 +/- 2, but none of these six names appeared to be a variation of Shapel. But when I viewed the record for Robert Sharin and found a Hooker and an Emil, I realized I had nally found the record I was searching for.

e information for the brothers aligned with other records I had, but the name Sharin? Although it wasn’t phonetically close, the spelling was close enough, and I surmised that the error occurred with the census taker, possibly the result of a language barrier.

And nally I had my conclusive proof that Hooker, Emil (Amel), and Robert had lived in Elmira, along with another previously unknown brother, Carl. I now had the given names of