1931 Census of Canada - A Release Fiasco?

Let's be honest, the public release of the images from the 1931 Census of Canada by Library and Archives Canada on June 1, 2023 was a fiasco.

On the surface all looked good according to their "Preparing the 1931 Census" page.

Screen capture of Library and Archives Canada "Preparing the 1931 Census" web page showing "Go public" checked.

At 8 a.m. ET on June 1, 2023 the 1931 Census search page was active and by 8:17 a.m. the site was already at a crawl with long delays displaying the thumbnail images of the pages and the pages themselves. Quite often it would seem like the site was stalled. The LAC site can be slow at the best of times but this was so painfully slow that I walked away from the site. Like any good genealogist, I started doing other research periodically checking back in to see if maybe they had added more back-end processing power to compensate for the load.

No such luck and by 10:43 a.m. ET an overload notice was displaying on the search page:

Screen capture of the Library and Archives Canada "high level of traffic" notice on the 1931 Census search page retrieved at 10:43 a.m. on June 1, 2023.

Congratulation to the genealogy and family history researchers out there! We basically broke the Library and Archives Canad web site. I guess Library and Archives Canada forgot that there are a lot of us out there and we are very passionate and enthusiastic for any new genealogy collections, especially census releases.

I still had my hopes up and would check in on the site to see if it was getting better.

Nope!

By the evening we were now seeing a brand new message. Instead of being horribly slow in displaying the images we were getting a "Unable to open [object Object]: Error loading image at https://central-d.dev.bac-lac.gc.ca/.item/?id=e011717820&app=census1931&op=img" message (substitute the e011717820 for some other number for any other image).

Screen capture of "Unable to open [object Object]: Error loading image at https://central-d.dev.bac-lac.gc.ca/.item/?id=e011717820&app=census1931&op=img" from the Library and Archives Canada 1931 Census search page from 10:23 p.m. ET on June 1, 2023.

It almost seems like someone updated the program on the server, tested it in house OK, but forgot to change the pointer to the image files from the development version to the live production version of the 1931 Census images. Of course, by then everyone working on the web site had probably gone home since the issue still existed as of 8:30 a.m. ET on June 2, 2023.

But this error pointed me to a possible solution. For you see, I recognize that URL from my efforts in playing with the other censuses of Canada to find records with addresses to help me find land records in Ontario.

For example, here is the link to the image for the 1901 Census of Canada page from Library and Archives Canada for my 3rd great-grandfather, Luke McMullen, on page 2 in Elmsley North sub-district, Lanark South district, Ontario: https://central.bac-lac.gc.ca/.item/?app=Census1901&op=img&id=z000077117.

It is very similar to the image file location being given for the 1931 Census of Canada. Except the 1931 Census is pointing to a "central-d.dev.bac-lac.gc" server and not "central.bac-lac.gc.ca". 

Using my browser, could I try opening the image given to me in the error massage but change "central-d.dev" to just "central"? Of course I could and I did!

Image retrieved from https://central.bac-lac.gc.ca/.item/?id=e011717820&app=census1931&op=img showing the sub-district descriptive card.

Suddenly I had access to the missing images. 

A small victory for me!

Now I was very familiar with navigating the images using that sort of URL. So I rearranged the stuff after the question mark in the address to put "id=" at the end to get https://central.bac-lac.gc.ca/.item/?app=census1931&op=img&id=e011717820. Now I could quite easily and simply change the last digits of the id to go to the hopefully next image.

I decided to focus my efforts on finding the household of Nathaniel and Winnifred (Warrener) McKinlay. They are my paternal grandparents and, according to the 1932 City Directory of London, Ontario they resided at 579 Colborne Street. Why the 1932 directory and not the 1931 directory? Often a city directory wasn't published the same year the information was collected so I will use the following year's directory first as my starting point when dealing with censuses.

After about 60 minutes later of going through the images, using Google Maps to see if the addresses appearing on the images were getting closer or not to my target address, after glancing through about 178 images I found them exactly where I hoped. 

A big victory for me!

"1931 Census", images, Library and Archives Canada (https://central.bac-lac.gc.ca/.item/?app=census1931&op=img&id=e011656764 : accessed 1 Jun 2023 19h12), Population Schedule, Ontario, London district (127), London Ward 4 sub-district (29), p 1 containing the household of Nathaniel McKinley in dwelling 12, family 14.

I then pushed my luck and tried to find my other grandparents in Winnipeg. That was much more of a challenge just due to how the sub-districts are laid out in Winnipeg and where my grandparents lived. I actually had to walk away several times in frustration. But, using a search suggestion by Dave Obee in his CanGenealogy 1931 census research tips of using the 1926 Census of the Prairie Provinces as a possible starting place for the district I did finally find them just after midnight.

Am I glad I could access the 1931 Census of Canada? Of course I am!

Am I really annoyed at Library and Archives Canada for botching the release of this census? You bet I am!

However, despite their failures I did find my grandparents but only due to my limited understanding of how LAC stores their census images.

The release of this census could have been a wonderful success story for Library and Archives Canada. Instead I consider this to be a release fiasco. Shame on Library and Archives Canada!

I'm only hoping that Ancestry and FamilySearch, in their indexing of the 1931 Census of Canada, meets with more success and that they don't let us down.

UPDATE - 2 June 2023 11:07 AM

Ancestry Canada now has the images of the 1931 Census of Canada available on their site in the appropriately named collection "1931 Census of Canada" found at https://www.ancestry.ca/search/collections/62640/. In my limited testing it would seem that you only need a free Ancestry account, at least for those in Canada, to access the collection. A paid subscription does NOT seem to be needed. Much like the Library and Archives Canada 1931 Census site, the images can only be browsed...for now. But at least Ancestry's site works and can also handle the load.

Screen capture from Ancestry's "1931 Census of Canada" collection search page found at https://www.ancestry.ca/search/collections/62640/.

UPDATE - 2 June 2023 12:07 PM

It looks like LAC has resolved the issue with the images attempting to be retrieved from the wrong server but the LAC site is still as slow as molasses on a cold Canadian winter night. Since Ancestry now has the same images, their filmstrip makes it easy to move to the next sub-district, and the Ancestry site is generally much faster when viewing images, I'm going to stick with Ancestry's "1931 Census of Canada" collection for my personal research.