Sometimes this can be challenging as some of our ancestor’s names were misspelled or were interpreted wrong on various websites making searching for them difficult. Another thing that happens is an ancestor can show up in one census, disappear in the next, then show up in the same area again in the following census. When this happens a good suggestion is to search for the neighbors and see if your ancestors show up in the census where you were unable to find them before. For example, if you find a John Smith living next to your ancestor in one census and a Patrick Murphy in another census, look for those people in the census where you could not locate your ancestor. Maybe your ancestor was there the whole time and they were indexed incorrectly or they were missed all together.
Roots Discovery 