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Most census takers in the 20th century were educated and therefore would spell a name in the most common form unless someone stated otherwise. For example, you would be hard pressed to find a Wilyam in the early 20th century, but in the 19th century you would find Willyam, Willieam, Willam, etc. because census takers would simply write how they thought it was spelled due to lack of education. That doesn't exlude that there were legitimate spelling variations such as Edythe, Edyth, and Edith.

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But, foreign names are also misspelled quite frequently if the census taker was not of the culture he was taking a census from, and simply unaware of the names and would thus spell them phonetically or sometimes nowhere near phonetically due to language barriers. Hence also why many people have Americanized surnames after immigrating to the US. Petrovich changed to Peters, for example.