Yearbooks: Beyond the Photos

It's a blustery Autumn day as you wait with your friends for the morning school bus. You've tried to give extra care to your appearance today and your hair is just not at its best. Maybe you should have gotten a haircut last week--or maybe you shouldn't have gotten a haircut last week. On top of that, acne has erupted on your face and your favorite shirt didn't make it through the wash this week.  Of course. . .

It's School Picture Day!

Funny that decades later I remember that Freshman year picture day so well.  My only consolation was that most of us had similar experiences and a couple of months after the yearbook came out, no one remembered what you looked like the previous year anyway.  

Wouldn't you love to find your parents or grandparents in a record of their school years?

Who knew that school yearbooks would become another valuable resource for genealogical research?

Use yearbooks:

•  to prove family relationships
•  to establish time and location
•  show personal interests through activities and clubs
•  see physical characteristics or individual traits

As a child I had a habit of shyly tilting my head when my picture was being taken.  Imagine my surprise when I saw my freshman high school picture with the same trait.  And when I looked at pictures of my mother as a child, she did the same thing!

MaryLynn age 3

    

MaryLynn age 13

      

Doris Stowe age 6 or 7

When researching one of my aunts, I found 1930s reference to a man from my hometown; I later found him in the 1940 census with his wife and two young boys.  Since the boys were only a couple of years older than I, there was a good chance to find them in my school yearbooks.  One of the boys was a senior when I was a freshman.  And his younger sister, born after the census, was in my class all through high school.

Looking for children in successive yearbooks helped to verify ages and birth order, oldest to youngest, in a family.  Looking for neighbors and cousins is another helpful hint in the local yearbooks.

Was your relative a teacher or school employee?  Look at yearbooks where they worked to get some idea of when they started and left that job.

Darby, Montana: Darby High School

Often businesses in the community advertised in the local school yearbook as a method of sponsoring the school.  This is another method of proof.  Look for family businesses year after year.

Look at directories for local industries and professions.  Many were published annually and may contain biographies for executives, managers and "employees of the month".

Where do you find these wonderful resources?  Both Ancestry and My Heritage have extensive collections.  Also check with Classmates.com and your individual alma mater for alumni organizations. 

Not every yearbook is digitized.  You may have to contact the school or local library and ask for help but it is worth the effort if it helps to solve a mystery or prove a connection.

MaryLynn has mentioned above some of the reasons you might want to consult yearbooks. I've discovered that Ancestry.com makes that easy once you have established the name of the school and the years your ancestor or relative might have attended. Be sure to check more than one year, because every year is different! While searching Lincoln High School in Seattle for 1947, I found some gems about my mother I never knew. I knew that my beautiful mother was brilliant, but I never knew that she was a news-writer for her school newspaper her junior year!

First, my mother, Lola McBee in her senior portrait from the 1948 yearbook: 

The collection is described as "U.S., School Yearbooks, 1900-2016,"an indexed collection of middle school, junior high, high school, and college yearbooks from across the United States. 1"

By searching by keyword Lincoln High School, Seattle, Washington and then searching for the name McBee, I came up with lots of images, including some surprises. I had seen her 1947 photo, but not what was next to it: 

I knew none of this! Other pages on which she appears showed that she served on the "Totem Weekly" all of that year, and became the News Editor. A bit about the paper:

1. "Ancestry.com. U.S., School Yearbooks, 1900-2016" [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010; Original data: Various school yearbooks from across the United States.

    

        

Valorie Zimmerman