Sources that were tried and failed
Recorded so nobody repeats them:
Ancestry over plain HTTP (403; works in a browser, data masked) ·
Ancestry's 1950 census (mandatory account) ·
FamilySearch's record layer (free account required; the tree layer is open) ·
Echovita (loads, but the obituary is auto-generated filler).
⚠️ Three entries on this list were wrong, and were corrected on 14 September 2026 by
re-testing every one of them rather than by reasoning about them. What the servers
actually return today:
MyHeritage returns HTTP 200, not 403 — it was never blocking us ·
Legacy.com returns HTTP 410 Gone, not 403, which is a different failure with
a different fix ·
Chronicling America's JSON API 308-redirects to its replacement at
www.loc.gov — it is not a retired 404, and a client that follows redirects
reaches it. The 403s that are real: Ancestry, SortedByName and Dignity Memorial.
Added 16 September 2026 — Fold3. It is reachable and it is not CAPTCHA-walled,
despite a first report to the contrary caused by a guard that trips on the word "recaptcha" in
the sign-in widget's own script. It authenticates through Ancestry single sign-on at
/login (/signin is a 404). ⚠️ Its search silently ignores the
?keywords= URL parameter and returns the whole 577-million-record corpus,
byte-identical for any query — a failure that looks like success. Only the search box works.
Recorded here precisely because it fails quietly.
A "sources that failed" list is only useful if it is true, so this one is now measured
rather than remembered.
Two false leads worth remembering: there are no Proegers buried in Texas on
FindAGrave at all, and the apparent "Proeger" in the 1950 Texas census is a
Kroeger — an unrelated family with no nine-year-old boy in it.
Added 13 September 2026. SortedByName returned HTTP 403 on both Coffman pages
having answered for Proeger earlier the same day — rate-limiting, not a missing page.
Dignity Memorial 403s a plain fetch and Legacy.com answers 410 to one
(corrected 14 September — this line said both 403'd); both were read in a real browser
instead. FindAGrave 429s after about 120 memorials, so alphabetical sweeps
are useless: search by first name plus death year and it answers instantly. The
FamilySearch NUMIDENT collection and the New Jersey birth certificate both
need a login or an archive order and were not attempted.
No paywall or CAPTCHA was defeated anywhere in this research.
The Portal to Texas History has come off this list. It sat here all day as
"CAPTCHA, not attempted". That is still literally what happened — the check-box was never
defeated, it was cleared by a human on the evening of 13 September, which is the
honest way past one. The archive was then searched and harvested; see the last card in
What is still unknown for what remains on it.
One search trap worth writing down, because it cost a whole earlier pass: the
1950 census API filed Austin's enumeration districts under county="Austin,
Travis", so querying county=Travis returned nothing and the Caffey
household looked absent from Texas. Sweep the state with no county filter.