Immigrants suffered from this on arrival at the USA from all over the world. Some of them had their Russian or Czech names changed for ease into Scottish surnames!

Some families deliberately changed their surnames, because of expected bias in favour of Anglo-saxon surnames. Others, like the McGregors, had to change their surnames to something else, under a legal proscription as a punishment for rebellion.

In Scotland, almost every surname has a whole stack of variants, some having 40-50 variants on the one name! The IGI lumps all the variants it can find under one spelling, but still missed other variants.

The OPR Index, on the other hand, indexes names AS SPELLED in the original Old Parish Register, so be prepared to look for variants if your relative is not where you expected. The cd-rom version of this, "Scottish Church Records" (not on sale, on view at LDS centres only) is better at finding the variant spellings, but is not totally successful.

If in doubt, try under other possible spellings.

Another factor is that in Scotland you can legally change your name just by informing all the people who ought to know - your creditors, the taxman, etc., and of course your friends. (In England it is done by a legal procedure called a Deed Poll).

Placenames can be affected by spelling variation as well. If you cannot find the place your ancestor says he came from, try considering other ways the placename could be spelled - some are real beauties: Stron or Strawn is probably Strachan; Finechty is Findochty; The Geary is actually The Garioch; Afford is Alford, the town of Bervie is officially Inverbervie, and these are just examples from the North-east.