Day: April 14, 2019

Ancestry.com has a growing collection of high school and college yearbooks that can add a personal dimension to your ancestors.  It’s been fun to see some of the pictures that have shown up as hints for my relatives. 

While I was researching Wilber Sidney Squire (L449-4YR) and his descendants (see: Finding Wilbur Sidney Squire), I found college yearbook pictures for his daughter and son. Besides the pictures, you can sometimes learn about their interests and activities. Christine L Squire (L2Q3-QTV), for example, was involved in the school newspaper and many other school organizations. These details can help you connect records. Christine went on to be a professional news writer. Knowing that she had spent several years on the school newspaper helped me recognize her in the 1940 census in Minneapolis, Minnesota because her occupation was listed as reported-writer.

Sometimes you find some amusing things…

In 1945, this senior at Lewistown High School “willed” his height to Jay Peterson (a sophomore at the time). Apparently, one of the things they asked seniors was what they would “will” to someone else at the school when they graduated. They were pretty much all impossible things to give away.

It is worth paging through the yearbook when you do get hints because you might find a picture of your relative without a name associated with it. I found the picture below of the Lewistown HS sophomore class after paging through it based on the hint that showed George willed his hight to Jay. There are no names in the book to align with the people in the picture, but I was able to find Jay. See if you can pick him out too. The other pictures of him below should help.

I found that Dr. Lynn Peterson was the veterinarian sponsor listed in the Lewistown, PA High School yearbook every year from at least 1947 until 1959.

Depending on your age, you might even start finding yourself in yearbook pictures on Ancestry.

The best way to see all the pictures I find is to have your own tree on Ancestry. The pictures I extract from yearbooks and upload as standalone pictures will show up as hints if you have a tree with the same person in it (plus you will get the same hints that lead me to the yearbooks in the first place). I am also uploading pictures to FamilySearch.org, but you won’t be able to see them for living people, at least for right now.

At RootsTech, the instructor of the class What’s New on FamilySearch? indicated that family groups are coming that will allow members of the group to see some living records, and hopefully that would include memories that have been uploaded. Right now, the warning on FamilySearch says “anyone could potentially see the photos, documents, and stories that are attached to this person” for a living person. However, while I can see memories my mother and grandfather uploaded for my grandfather, my mother can’t see the pictures I have uploaded for my grandfather. I think the policy changed several years ago. The pictures that show up for both of us were upload several years ago (like 2014) and more recent ones (like 2016) are not showing up for both of us.