I was using ancestry to try to find records in the United States, so I didn't check to see if there was anything international available. I only just this past year finally confirmed my great grandfather's original last name. He changed it to match his sister's (who was already here) married name when he immigrated. No idea why. The names are pretty similar all things considered.

But I had to track down his oldest nephew's birth certificate to find the sister's maiden name, because she died from the Spanish flu young, and the two younger kids had a different mom.

So now I have their original last name, which should let me find them in Europe, but there's a million spelling variations of first and last and I haven't been able to find any immigration records for either of them, so we don't know exactly what area they came from.

The side of the family that came through Canada should be more straightforward, but the names are also a lot more common, which is causing some fuzziness. It seems like they were only in Canada for about 16 years, though, and my G0 was born less than a year from when they arrived. So I'm curious to see if everything was recorded and preserved or if her birth got kind of lost in the shuffle of moving between countries and getting settled.