Looking for the Sangaline Family in Saugerties

German immigrant Peter Sangaline was known to be living with his wife Margaret and children in Saugerties, Ulster County, New York from the early 1870s until after 1910.  Searching through the federal census records online, I initially could not find them. I searched both ancestry.com and Heritage Quest hoping to find a match in at least one of those sources. I just could not find them even if I varied the spelling. The German spelling might be Zangline, but no luck there either.



Having no success on surname matches, I decided to search for Peter without listing a surname, born 1836 in Bavaria, living in Saugerties, working in the brick yard. Even that resulted in lists of seemingly wrong matches. However, by looking more carefully at the length of the surnames displayed and then examining each record for the family details, I did find him in all but 1870.


Here is a recap of all the variations I found on his name, using the Ulster County Archives, ancestry.com, Heritage Quest and family.search:


1880 federal census SANGGLER
1887 Naturalization (UC Archives) SEINGLING
1900 federal census SANGALINO on ancestry and DANGALINO on HQ
1905 state census SANGALINE, Peter on UC archives and as PETRE on familysearch
1910 federal census IANGALINE on ancestry and IANGALINI on HQ
1911 state death certificate SANGYLNE
and finally, his gravestone at St Mary's Cemetery in Saugerties:

This is the spelling used by most of the family in following generations except for one branch which used SANGLYN. 


Lessons learned: Be flexible in your search, don't assume names will be spelled correctly or indexed as written, check as many sources as possible to come up with a conclusion as to which spelling is correct, realize that there may be variants used by family members