After only or less than three hours of sleep, I got up for the opening ceremony for the 1940 US Census. I knew the servers would be overloaded, but after finding they were using the Amazon cloud, I expected better.
However, after fighting with the web site through no responses and server errors, even seeing “too many connections” among my error messages (so much for scaling up), I was able to download some pages from an ED in New York City. At the UJGS meeting, I looked up the ED for Ludwig Schwartzman, who was living c/o Kessler, so it was a good start because it was two different cousins at the same address.
The ED had 26 pages, and downloading one at a time was tedious to say the least. I noticed the street addresses seemed low and I was worried I was in the wrong ED.
And then, 10 pages in, success!
But wait, where’s Ludwig? Oh, never mind, I found my grandparents! Schooling is interesting as Sidney is H3 and Mary is 8. So Sidney finished three years of high school? I’ll have to look up what that means exactly. And they both work at a laundry that he owns; sounds right. And they lived at the same place in 1935. That’s unexpected.
I’m not usually one to fight with the server on opening day, so this is probably it for me for a while, unless I’m awake at 3am and things are moving along easier. I’ll be watching for chatter about the indexing up and running and get in on that.
The URL for this article is http://idogenealogy.com/blog/2012/04/02/1940-census-my-first-find/.
Update: It occurred to me hours later that, while I was looking for Ludwig Schwartzman, he might not even have been in the country yet. How about that? I should check on that sometime, eventually. I also realized I forgot to tag the surnames, and that I probably didn’t even mention them in the post. For the record, I located Abraham Kessler, his wife Esther, daughter Julia, and my grandparents Sidney and Mary Feldstein. Not that they are much for cousin bait, but you never know.