
1940 Census so popular that servers can't handle demand

Americans' fascination with their roots overwhelmed Monday's ballyhooed online rollout of the complete 1940 Census when 22.5 million people swarmed the website in the first three hours — paralyzing the system.

  • Angela Walton-Raji was one of several million people who attempted to log in to the National Archives website Monday morning. An overloaded system never got off the ground for Walton-Raji and many others.

    By Doug Kapustin, for USA TODAY

    Angela Walton-Raji was one of several million people who attempted to log in to the National Archives website Monday morning. An overloaded system never got off the ground for Walton-Raji and many others.

By Doug Kapustin, for USA TODAY

Angela Walton-Raji was one of several million people who attempted to log in to the National Archives website Monday morning. An overloaded system never got off the ground for Walton-Raji and many others.

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Most people couldn't access the free data on the National Archives and Records Administration's website. Not even Census Director Robert Groves, who attended the official unveiling at the Archives in Washington, D.C., and looked up his grandfather, who lived in St. Louis in 1940. The site, 1940census.archives.gov, kept loading — and loading and loading — but never came up.

The hangup caused frustration for historians and family researchers, embarrassment for the Archives and a chance for private sites such as Ancestry.com, which had some images ready for viewing as early as the wee hours, to gloat.

"I was on for 55 minutes and never got it to display anything," said Mary Ellen Sicard, a retired computer programmer from Estherville, Iowa, who is so passionate about tracing her family tree that she was on the site five minutes after it went live — or didn't. "For a long time, I couldn't even get the search box to come up."

The Archives partnered with Inflection, a private Silicon Valley company that owns the family history site Archives.com, to host the 1940 Census site.

"We were assured we could accommodate a large number of people, but I don't think anybody anticipated the absolutely enormous response we got in the first couple of hours," said Susan Cooper, spokeswoman at the National Archives.

By the end of the business day, the site had gotten 37 million hits.

Ancestry.com and other companies purchased the digitized 1940 Census and picked it up as soon as it became available. The first images were available on www.Ancestry.com/1940 within two hours, and more than 100,000 were expected by day's end, including the records of famous Americans from Albert Einstein to Martin Luther King. It will make the entire 1940 Census records free through 2013. Laws restrict the release of names listed in a Census until 72 years later.

"What a disappointment," Angela Walton-Raji, a retired university administrator from Catonsville, Md., said of the glitches. She runs an African-Native American genealogy website and was eager to see what her father was doing for a living in Fort Smith, Ark., in 1940. "We got only a screen that said 'loading' and a 'preparing image' screen," she said. It's been saying (it) for 20 minutes."

Sicard and tweeters took things in stride, noting that since people have waited 72 years for the release, another hour or day was no big deal.

When will Sicard try the Archives site again? "I'm thinking probably in the middle of the night. …When you finally find something that you've been searching and searching for, it's a real high. I don't do drugs. I don't drink. But this is a real high."

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