Employment Records, although they may be difficult to locate and obtain, can provide vital statistics information and details about the person. Cemetery Inscriptions provide pointers to newspaper obituaries, which point to churches and undertakers and doctor' s records. City Directories provide names, addresses and, in some cases, occupations. These can all point to land and property records. Records of Siblings and Children may include valuable references to the ancestor you're researching.
Deeds can point to a buyer or a seller residing at another place.
They can also confirm the name of a spouse, and too, the names of other owners of adjacent properties. Deeds are, indeed, a more reliable source for verifying the location or persons at a particular point in time than census records. These 'alternative records' can offer you some hope in getting around those roadblocks. If you're a regular reader of this column, you know that I advocate studying entire family units rather than tracing a single line backwards. There is a lot of logic in that approach.