And, a thank you to Simone for including my surname related articles. Roostsweb provides a large number of surname mailing lists at Surname Resources at RootsWeb . You may want to subscribe to a list of your surname or a known variant to start a discussion of further spellings and the history of these variations. GenForum provides an extensive list of surname forums. You can discover spelling variations and post requests for the history of a surname at this site.
Some surnames can be very problematic, for instance Eastern European names.
There may be variations that you may have never dreamed of as immigration officials translated the names to an English version. If you have a very uncommon name, it may be much more common in the country of origin in its original form. You may have to study a bit of the language of origin to guess at the possible english translation that occured. Study the sounds of letters and letter groups in that language, play with possible combinations of letters to come up with english translations.