Pearl Stodghill

One thing I really hate is when I come across a record for a female ancestor and her maiden name field is filled in with her married name.  There have been a few cases I found where maiden name matched married name, but in every other case, it's worse than useless.

My mother's maiden name is Stodghill.  This name turns out to have a long, interesting history in the United States, and links me into documented lineages for groups like the Sons of the American Revolution, the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne in the United States, and the Jamestowne Society.  I'm particularly interested in the ancestors who brought this name to me, though.
One of these families was Walter S. Stodghill (b. 10 Jan 1871 d. 4 Mar 1949) and Pearl Stodghill (b. 9 Feb 1880 d. 6 Jun 1956).  These were the names as I discovered them, and Pearl's last name was a frustration to me.

Everything I knew about Pearl came from her death certificate.  She was born in Kentucky.  She died in Arizona.  Her parents were listed as "Unk".  Her birth year presented problems related to finding out who she was.
For one, there wasn't a record of a "Pearl" of the appropriate age in the 1880 Census in Kentucky.  For those of you new to genealogy, the 1890 Census is largely unavailable due to its having been destroyed in a fire, so there was no way to find her at age 10.  I haven't located her in the 1900 Census yet (Walter is still living with his parents in Kentucky and listed as "Single").  The first record I have of her is in 1910, when she's married to Walter, and has two children, Henry and Jewell.

Arizona's vital record access is spectacular.  Apparently the LDS has made inroads with the state government so that they could index all available vital records and place them online in a publicly-accessible database.  This made it possible for me to retrieve all of the birth and death records for the family.
I already had the documents for my direct lineage, so I knew that Henry's death certificate wouldn't give me any more information about Pearl.  However, Jewell died at the age of 19, so her parents filled her death certificate out, and there I found my first clues about Pearl.
The handwriting was bad, but Pearl's maiden name was there.  It was either Sutton or Sutter.
This particular question was relatively easy to answer.  I looked through the 1880 Census and couldn't find any Sutter families nearby where she and Walter would have originated from.  However, I *did* find Sutton families.  Therefore, her maiden name was Sutton.
Pearl Sutton!

I still had a problem, though.  There wasn't any record of Pearl Sutton in the 1880 Census!
Sometimes Census records (or any records, really) use middle names instead of first names.  I didn't know Pearl's middle name, so I decided to look at the families in the area who had children under the age of 1.

And there I found, in the city of Greensburg, a family headed by Reuben Sutton (b. 1850 d. 22 Jun 1939), with two children, "No Name Sutton" and "Baby Sutton".
Those names are a sure-fire indication that the information on this family was provided by someone other than the family itself (probably a neighbor).  But...
Baby Sutton was 4 months old and female.  The Census was performed in June 1880.  Pearl, being born in February, would have been exactly 4 months old.  I can't be sure of it, but this strongly points to Pearl having been born in Greenburg.

I had found both Pearl's maiden name and her family!