Hit a 404 on a government site from 2003, still holds the key to a town mystery

I was digging through old county records online for a genealogy project and stumbled on a broken link to a 2003 census archive. The page loaded as a half-finished table with one row showing a population of 317 for a town that's been empty since 1989. Has anyone else found a dead link that gave them more clues than the live version ever did?

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sandra_murphy5d ago

That broken data is a goldmine honestly. Half finished tables hit different, like the system froze mid thought in 2003. Found something similar once, a county tax page from the 90s that listed properties nobody remembered. The live version scrubbed all of it, but the dead link still had the full old names. Weird how the ghosts hang out in the errors.