1940 U.S. Census

After much promotion, the 1940 U.S. Census schedules are now available for searching. There will not be an index immediately available to search by name, however several organizations have joined forces to take on this task and are asking for your help. The 1940 U.S. Census Community Project is a national volunteer service project that will likely make Internet history as the largest and most innovative use of 'crowd sourcing' ever seen. So you can help index the 1940 Census. They hope to have it totally indexed in six months. If you would like to help out go to -
https://the1940census.com/getting-started/
Ancestry.com is advertising the census availability as a means to attract people to ancestry.com. While it is available through Ancestry.com free for a limited time, it is also available through other sources without a fee and no membership requirements. The census can be checked out at: http://1940census.archives.gov

During the live launch event of the 1940 Census, Census Director Robert Groves was set to search for a member of his family. But the image never loaded, according to a story in the Chicago Tribune. Upon launch the website 1940census.archives.gov was immediately overwhelmed. In the first three hours, the website had 22.5 million hits.
The site was designed to support 10 million hits a day, with 25,000 concurrent users. Access issues have now been addressed, but it adds weight to the claim that Genealogy is the biggest hobby in America.