Noms, plumes

The 19th century French guy I'm researching at the moment a) shares a name with several other historical figures of equal or greater importance, and b) is himself writing under several different names, mostly variants of his own, sometimes initials. And boy, there are a lot of initials. Yesterday I found what looked, from the microfilm, to be yet another piece of writing by the dude. After printing and reading the document, I found that it was an angry letter-to-the-editor about the dude, written by a man with the same name. Part of me thinks this is in itself interesting, but the other part thinks, couldn't these people have all just gone by social security numbers or something?