Monday, April 2, 2012

Not the highlight of my genealogy day

Here is what I saw many times today on the NARA 1940census.archives.gov website.


The message says:

The requested URL /ext/ed-zip/c25b6bc0ffe86ceeae6cf45632769426/1333407252|40c3b43a1b2191d8c9f6631e877fee1c/ca.62-63A.zip was not found on this server.

The server data was:

Apache/2.2.20 (Ubuntu) Server at prod-nara-bp-20120330-464832304.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com Port 80

I have no clue what any of this means, but it sure was frustrating to wait 15 to 30 minutes and then face this.  I absolutely wasted six hours today trying hard to find my target families in San Diego and Leominster, Mass. and have absolutely nothing to show for it.  I'm hoping that the San Diego city data is loaded onto Ancestry.com tonight.  Some of the County EDs are there, but not the City EDs.

 I was able to access a San Francisco ED where I thought Linda's father resided, but I was wrong.  I did search the entire 64 page ED.  That goes fairly fast, but is deathly boring for someone who got up two hours early to access the 1940 census.

I really appreciate how my colleagues on Twitter, Google Plus and Facebook tried to help me and others, and for encouraging us to keep working at it.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/04/not-highlight-of-my-genealogy-day.html

copyright (c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

4 comments:

Banai Lynn Feldstein said...

Looks like you were trying to get an entire ED. I never got one. I had a lot of errors in between those ten out of 26 pages in the ED. I did get a zip file once, but it was empty. The pages I got from NARA were downloaded one page at a time, and they never loaded in the browser. Everything else I did was on Ancestry. And I took a quick look at FamilySearch just to see, but they've got all the wrong states for me.

Jennifer Sepulvado said...

Looks like people should quit knocking Ancestry.com for not joining the great collaboration to make the census free. They seem to be the only ones halfway able to get the job done.

Anonymous said...

FamilySearch isn't doing too bad. They have five states up. Ancestry has four, DC, and four US protectorates.

Anonymous said...

I predict archives.gov will spin this into a positive - "unprecedented demand overwhelms newly released census" or some such thing. All of this was predictable, as I think you actually did Randy. I assume some combination of bad project management and/or lack of experience at archives.gov is the real story. Using 1940census.archives.gov today was like standing in line at the post office.