If you spent hours slumped frustrated in front of a computer screen this week you were not alone.

Hundreds of thousands of people allover the country were doing it too, desperately trying to log on to a new website to gain a glimpse into the past and to unearth some of their ancestors.

The cause of this unprecedented interest in the past was caused by the unveiling of the 1901 census, the first census to be released online, which supposedly will make it easier not only for amateur historians but people with only a casual interest to dabble in our national records.

Easier, that is, if you can actually get on to the site in the first place.

The census site virtually ground to a halt as more than a million users tried to log on and trace their family history during its first three hours.

The majority of those attempting to take a look were greeted with the message, "Sorry due to very heavy demand this site is temporarily unavailable," others were told in no uncertain terms that an "Apache Bridge" error had occurred, whatever that is, which for some reason meant the premature end of their surfing session.

The Public Record Office (PRO), which published the census at 9am, on January 2, had doubled the number of servers, and presumably Apache Bridges, in anticipation of the demand - but the sheer volume of hits made progress slow to non-existent.

An exasperated PRO spokesman with a talent for understatement, said: "We had planned for a million hits on the site a day but we're getting a million hits an hour, it's incredibly busy. As you can imagine we're pulling our hair out down here. But traffic on the site is beginning to die down now so hopefully more people will be able to get on it and come away satisfied now.

"The system is overloading and we ask people to be patient. All we can suggest is to keep trying."

On April 1, 1901, the borough of Bradford itself was split into the accounting areas of Bradford, Bradford East, Bradford West and Bowling and contained the names, ages, addresses and mental health - ranging from sane to feeble-minded and lunatic - of 279,809 inhabitants.

These were part of more than 32 million Edwardians who were recorded by the census including an infant Queen Mother and comedian Charlie Chaplin.

Chaplin is listed as a "music hall artiste" while legendary cricketer WG Grace is described as a "physician and secretary of the London County Cricket Club".

Other famous names to appear include French artist Claude Monet, author HG Wells, author JRR Tolkien and nurse Florence Nightingale.

Bradford in 1901 also had its fair share of illustrious names and famous faces.

Young JB Priestley, soon to play a very prominent role in the history of his home city, had just turned seven and was living in Mannheim Road, Heaton.

There were no signs of early scientific genius in Bradford's only ever Nobel Prize winner Sir Edward Appleton who lived in Hanover Square, Manningham aged eight.

Margaret McMillan had arrived in Bradford in 1893 aged 33. The New York-born educationalist had been invited North to help with the work of the newly-founded Independent Labour Party which had been founded that year.

McMillan stayed in the city until 1901, working as the youngest member of Bradford's School Board, during which time she helped introduce a range of radical innovations to improve the life of children in Bradford.

School Baths were introduced at Wapping Street School and later at Feversham Street School while Green Lane School in Manningham was the first to introduce school dinners.

Her far-sighted reforms were so successful that they were later adopted as national policy between 1906 and 1908 by the new Local Education Authorities.

Sadly, the only memorial to this pioneering woman is a blue plaque on the wall of a house in Hanover Square, off Manningham Lane, where she lived in 1901.

Other local notables whose census returns would make interesting reading include local hangman Thomas William Pierrepoint, who lived at 17 Northside Terrace, Clayton, and Bradford executioner James Berry who retired from his macabre job in 1894 to tour the music halls of Britain telling his grisly tales.

Former policeman Berry, who hanged 134 men and women in the last decade of the nineteenth century, continued to live at 1 Bilton Place, Bradford, until his death. After retiring he became an opponent of capital punishment.