I have to say that after a rocky start I made out pretty well yesterday – which was Day 1 of the 1940 US Federal Census release. I started pretty much at 9:oo EDT on the dot trying to access the ED where both my sets of my grandparents lived from the NARA website. After several hours of no luck — meaning the site was too busy and I was not even able to view one image – I tried Ancestry.com. Luckily for me, the state of Pennsylvania was near the top of the queue. By mid-afternoon, some of Chester County was available so I starting looking at North Coventry and South Coventry townships for some “cousins.” I hit the jackpot finding several families.
In the evening Montgomery County, Pennsylvania came online and I was able to access the ED for the 6th Ward of Pottstown. On one of the very first pages was my maternal grandparents with my mom as a little girl!!! A couple pages later I found my dad and his family!! There were really no surprises – everyone in the immediate families were right where they were supposed to be, working in the jobs I knew they had. But it was so cool to view their families and their neighbors and to actually recognize names of people I knew or had heard about!!
If you weren’t as lucky as I was on Day 1, don’t give up. Ancestry is continuing to load the states and seems well-equipped for the volume of people wanting access. (Currently, I have a subscription, but it is my understanding that the 1940 census images will be available for all to view thru 2013.) FamilySearch doesn’t have images for quite as many states uploaded, but they’ll get there — plus they have a small army of indexers! And, of course, since images are becoming available on these other sites, there will probably be fewer people trying to access directly from the NARA site. So you may have better success with access there too.
Good Luck and Happy Researching!
Janis' Genealogy Blog 