I may be able to shed some light on the missing birth records, and add to the surname confusion.
TL;dr: This person may have originally been a Dyrland.
My adoptive maiden name is Dyrland, a norwegian name. When it is pronounced in Norwegian, it sounds an awful lot like Durland. Many of my great grandparents families emigrated to the midwestern states in the Norwegian immigration boom of the 1800s. The Dyrland name splintered into those who kept it as Dyrland (a lot of the Dakotas and Canadian branches of the family).. Others accepted the anglicized version as Durland.
Dyrland is a county in the Telemark region of western Norway (where skiing was invented). As was the custom in the 1800s, emigrating Norwegians took the name of the farm or region they were from if they needed to differentiate from other branches of the family who had common names or descendants (e.g. my grandfather was a Pederson, literally Peter's Son, and he had 14 siblings).
The surname also gets misspelled often as Dryland, or as Durland or even Darland, because the Y-R consonant grouping look wrong *hence R-Y) or sounds wrong (Hence U-R) to American-English and Canadian-English eyes.
Until I started filling in profiles for the surname Dyrland here on Wiki tree this week, there were only four with the name on our tree, when there are about 1000 of them in the world. I'm working on it.
My suggestion would be to see if you can situate this person as a Dyrland or a Dryland and see if he can be linked back to Norway. On a quick search, I did see an emigration passenger list for him coming into Boston, so it is possible he wasn't born in the US, but rather came from Norway.
