You need to narrow the field
The flip side of having an unusual name prone to misspelling is having an annoyingly common name that forces you to wade through pages of matches on the EIDB website. Finding the solitary Shields from Ballymoney is one such example, but Morse's search form allows you to just as easily find the Italian Marinos rather than the Cuban ones, the Johnsens who departed from Sweden as opposed to other ports, the Robinsons who came during that 1892- 97 unindexed void, the Schmidt immigrants who were of draft age, the Richardsons who traveled on the S.S. Britannia, and so forth.

You suspect there are more "out there"
So you've "worked" the EIDB, exhausted every search you can think of, but believe there are probably still more ancestors to be found. You're not alone. Using just the EIDB, I found 15 Smolenyaks who came through Ellis Island, but I strongly suspected that there were more hidden under especially creative versions of our name. With some experimentation through Morse's site, I was able to smoke out another five. Coupling the first few letters of my surname with each of the following worked especially well:

Use first letters of the town name, including:

• likely misspellings of the town (e.g. speculating that the O and A sounds could be confused produced an Osturnite from "Astornia")
   
• ports of departure (e.g. guessing that some might have named the port of departure as their last residence revealed an Osturnite supposedly from Bremen)
   
• the letter U (e.g. knowing that some immigrants made visits to the old country turned up an Osturnite from the US)
   
• years of arrival of 1892 to 1897 (to find those who emigrated before last residence was consistently recorded)
   
• ethnicities (e.g. specifying Ruthenian surfaced the unanticipated spelling of Smolmak)

You're researching Jewish ancestors
Building on the efforts of Michael Tobias who combed the EIDB for all passengers having an ethnicity of "Hebrew", Morse created a separate search form specifically for Jewish passengers to Ellis Island. As Morse indicates, this remarkable search engine provides a true search-by-town capability and a true Soundex capability, neither of which is available from the EIDB itself. This means that it's especially easy to locate Jewish ancestors (provided they were listed as Hebrew). And if you have a little patience, you can assemble a list of all Jews from a particular shtetl by simply leaving the name fields blank and typing in the name of the town. A sample search on the village of Mosty Wielkie produced a list of 31 Jewish immigrants in about five minutes.

The ship's manifest is missing or mislinked
Occasionally, you'll find a match in the EIDB and try to view the original ship's manifest, only to find a "no image available" message or the wrong manifest. Unfortunately, links in the EIDB to many manifest images are broken (although far fewer than when the website first launched). Morse offers another simple tool  -- Finding Missing Manifests in One Step -- to help researchers find these missing images by using details given by the search results of the EIDB. Again, it is worth reading Morse's FAQs to fully understand how to use this to your best advantage.

There are some images that are missing from the EIDB altogether. Such errors can be reported to dberrors@ellisisland.org, but there's no timeframe for corrections and no response will be provided. In such cases, your best alternative is to do what you've always done in the past — make a copy from microfilm.

Happy Hunting!
First with the efforts of the American Family Immigration History Center, and then through the talents of Stephen P. Morse, Alex Calzareth and Michael Tobias, the more than 40 percent of Americans who are descended from Ellis Island immigrants received a tremendous gift. Evidence of our gratitude can be seen in the hundreds of Lithuanian, Italian, Norwegian, Cuban, Jewish, Irish and other ethnic websites that sing their praises. Here's hoping that the ideas shared here will help you get the most from your Ellis Island quest.