Monday, April 2, 2012

And the race is on…


… to find your ancestors in the 1940 US Census, released this morning!

Genealogists have been talking about, blogging about, and preparing for the census release for months. And the system has bogged down with everyone trying to use it at one time.

Don’t yell at your computer (or worse yet, those who have worked so hard to get it ready), don’t kick the dog, just relax and keep your census senses about you. Here are a few things you can try:
  1. Create an account on the NARA site and then bookmark those EDs that you want to look at; this will save a little time as you go back to the site to try one more time!
  2. If you can get to the images you need, download them and look at them offline. I haven’t been able to do this yet, but I have heard that people are having success downloading the images.
  3. Check Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org; both are uploading images to their servers which are browsable.

Everyone is eager to find their family members, but now that it has been released, the 1940 census is not going anywhere. If you can’t get to the images, do some other family research instead. The images will be there tomorrow, next week, a year from now. In fact, in 6-9 months, we’ll have an every name index!






© 2012 Denise Spurlock, Ancestral Trees Research

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