Ah the memories. School yearbooks, which immortalize how we looked and what we did in high school or college. Whether we looked goofy or cool, that photo is there forever. And they document what clubs, sports or other activities we were involved in. Primarily a North American phenomenon historically, the first yearbook published was the Yale Banner in the early 1800’s. But hey – what about our ancestors? They went to school too (at least some of them in the last 200 years). And they belonged to clubs and associations outside of school. Obituary Genealogy Guide Please enable JavaScript I have found some really good stuff about some of my ancestors and relatives. I didn’t know that Brooklyn-born Leo Markheim went to law school at the University of West Virginia. Or that Ethel Tinnemann was a tennis star at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1920s, or that her father Otto Tinnemann graduated with a degree from the same university in 1905, majoring in Mechanical Engineering. And now I have their photos to boot! Nowhere else was I able to find this information or what they looked like at an early age. So for me, discovering more about them and what they looked like has been a real boon to my research and filling out the stories of their lives. Thus your genealogy and family history research won’t be complete without looking into yearbooks. I encourage you to research old yearbooks as well. Offshoots are the Alumni Directories which also include address information and occupations. And there are yearbooks available for many associations that have nothing to do with school.
Yes, The Ancestor Hunt has recently started cataloging the links to FREE (and only free) yearbooks. Check out the Yearbooks tab for the link lists by state and province. Old yearbooks available online can be found in many places. And below are some great places to search. Some require a subscription or payment, but not all. Some are free, some are easy to use, and some are not too great actually. Many of these are for the U.S. only, but some have Canadian yearbooks available in the collection.
And then there is The Ancestor Hunt. What I am attempting to do is to assemble a list of links to school yearbooks that are totally free, regardless of their source. Most are from digitization projects at libraries, whether high schools in the local library’s general location, or at a college/university. There have been a few statewide projects, such as those in Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Virginia. But most projects are for one or just a few high schools. I am gathering the links from a wide variety of sources, such as all the Internet Archive collections, DPLA, Calisphere, users of Digital Commons software, etc. But most are just elbow grease searching. Currently at the date of this article’s publication, there are over 8,000 schools in the list. I don’t know how many yearbooks that equates to, but my guess is that it is over 50,000, but that is just a guess. And I won’t stop there. Like most of my link list collections, whether newspapers or others, I will continually and regularly update these lists. You can expect more links to free yearbooks to be listed in the future. So check out the Yearbooks Page on this site, and definitely make use of those sites listed above. You never know where that elusive yearbook may be found. Where can I see my yearbook?Online services like YearbookFinder.com, Classmates.com, Yearbook.org, and e-Yearbooks.com allow you to search their archives for physical scans of yearbooks as well as photographs, dates, and names in the yearbooks. These tools are easy to use and access online.
Are there digital yearbooks?An app driven digital yearbook that you can keep with you on your phone or tablet. The only digital, interactive version of your exact yearbook, where students & staff sign, sticker & video each other — right in the yearbook. Through the app, you can sign, sticker and send videos.
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