Albert Rossow’s 1946 yearbook caption reads, “The US Marines have lost a husky fellow who was with them for 2-1/2 years. Having been on duty on a seagoing ship, this ex-Marine now looks forward to attending college and becoming a veterinarian.”
Paging through school yearbooks can make for laughable moments when we see awkward photos of ourselves, but for genealogists, yearbooks can also be an important research tool as my Uncle Al’s caption proves.
When you consider that research records begin with a birth certificate then hop to marriage and voting, the childhood years are often lost to time. Researching in yearbooks can give us a peek into these formative years.
First and foremost, yearbooks can put our ancestors in a time and place. Beyond that, they offer a variety of details we can’t get from traditional resources. Student profiles may include clubs or organizations they belonged to and may even provide insight into what they might have been like in terms of personality. If an ancestor is missing from a particular school’s yearbook around wartime, checking the military yearbooks or annuals might pick up their trail.
Yearbooks also include advertisements from local businesses that sponsored the publication. If you have an ancestor with a local business, yearbooks can be an unexpected resource. As they are rarely indexed, take your time perusing them to find useful pieces of information. I suggest looking at each name in the class pictures. These are the people they interacted with, forged bonds with and sometimes even married. You may even find a famous classmate!
Finding yearbooks is relatively easy because they don’t contain sensitive information like other types of records. In many cases, local repositories such as a genealogical society (Niagara County Genealogical Society’s library has many!), public libraries or a historical society has them available to the public.
Thousands of yearbooks are available online as well. Many yearbook sites have been created to help facilitate class reunions, but they can help genealogists too. One such site is Classmates.com and while they offer subscription services, you can look through all their online yearbooks for free. Sign up for a free account then click the “Browse Yearbooks” button along the bottom of the page.
Another free site is Internet Archive at archive.org. This is a general-purpose website for all things old, not focused purely on genealogy. Its search engine allows users to look for old books, pictures, music and much else, including school yearbooks. The term “school yearbook” offers 48,873 results, which are digitized yearbooks, mainly originating from the United States in the period 1890 to 2000. The items are free to access and use.
As far as paid sites, my favorite is Ancestry.com which has a collection of more than 500,000 yearbooks available online. Access is often free for a time in September so start your research list to have on hand for that offer. Family History Centers and local libraries often have free access on-site as well.
Remember, many school yearbooks online have undergone OCR (optical character recognition), which enables computer searches of printed pages. It’s fantastic to be able to use search engines to filter information in photos and pictures. But OCR, too, has flaws and is not without its restrictions. Sometimes, words and sentences are misinterpreted by the system, so if you search only, you can miss out on vital information. Instead, do your due diligence and browse through pages with your own eyes to make sure you’re not missing a thing.
Yearbooks are one of those “home” sources (found in attics and basements) which many people don’t think of as a family history resource, yet they provide us with a fascinating perspective on our ancestors’ lives and serve as an important document of social history.