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Schools Leave Interesting Pages From Past

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By SHARON TATE MOODY

Tribune correspondent

Published: May 18, 2008

It's mid-May, the time when the school year is nearly over. A ritual of this season is delivery of school yearbooks, and it's likely that none of the students who bought one are thinking about their descendants.

In the hands of family historians, old yearbooks can be a treasure. They could picture Granny when she was in high school. It might show Grandpa as the star football player or Uncle Joe in the debating society. And what better way to study the clothing and hairstyles in vogue when these relatives were teenagers?
School yearbooks have been published since the 1800s, and if your relative received a formal education, tracking down a particular yearbook can be worth the effort.

The best place to start is online. Check for the school your ancestor may have attended. It could have a Web site that contains information about the school's yearbooks, or at least contact information. When you can't find a Web site, try calling the school.

I did a couple of test runs, looking up my high school and college. I didn't find my high school online, so I called. A helpful young lady at the main office transferred me to the school media center.

This was when things got a little weird. I told the woman in the media center who I was and why I was calling. I said that I graduated in 1966. She replied that we probably knew each other. She graduated in 1968.

I asked for her maiden name and nearly dropped the phone when she said it. She was my cousin. We hadn't seen or spoken to one another in more than 40 years. Proof, once again, that you never know where you'll find a relative.

When we got back to my reason for calling, I learned the yearbooks are available back to 1950.

Next, I checked the University of Georgia's site and found the phone number for the yearbook office. I called several times, but no one answered. Then I called the alumni association and struck pay dirt. The school began publishing yearbooks in 1886, and the alumni association has yearbooks dating to 1894.

The people I talked to at my high school and college were friendly and said they would make free copies of yearbook pages when someone makes a request.

You can also look for information about many yearbooks that has been digitized by libraries and other sources. The special collections department of the Alexandria Library in Virginia used yearbooks to create an index of senior classes at area high schools from 1919 to 1951. The database has the names of 4,700 students.

After finding a person's name in the database - at www.alexandria.lib.va.us/lhsc_genealogy_resources/... - you can order a copy of his or her photograph.

Another good example is a collection of yearbooks at the Kansas City Public Library in Missouri. It isn't set up as definitively as the one in Alexandria, but it is still impressive. Go to www.kclibrary.org/ localhistory/index.cfm and enter "yearbooks" in the site's search engine.

A visit with Dead Fred might be valuable, too, for some researchers. Go to www .deadfred.com/annuals_ 05 .php, where you'll enjoy spending some time with Fred.

Of course, this is really Dead Fred's Genealogy Photo Archive, a delightful Web site founded by Joe Bott. Bott named his site after Frederick III, the German regent who was living at the same time as Bott's second great-grandfather. In addition to old yearbook pictures, the site contains thousands of photographs of ancestors waiting to be identified.

A growing number of commercial sites also have digitized a variety of records, including quite a few yearbooks. They can be accessed when you have a paid subscription for the site. Here are some:

•Ancestors at Rest, www.ancestorsatrest.com/school_yearbooks. Annual fee is $29.95

•E-yearbook, www.e-year book.com. Annual fee is $29.95, or $4.95 a month with a minimum three-month subscription.

•World Vital Records, www.worldvitalrecords.com. Two-year subscriptions are being offered for $49.95. This site has much more than access to yearbooks, which means you'll be getting more for your money. The yearbook collection is under directories.

•Ancestry.com, www .ancestry.com. This can't be ignored in any genealogical quest. It features the U.S. School Yearbook collection. Annual fee is $155, or you can get free access by using computers at Hillsborough County public libraries.

Babel On

Have you ever visited a foreign genealogy site and found it to be only in the native language - the one you don't speak? You may be able to get help with translation at Babel Fish ( www.babelfish.altavista .com/babelfish/tr). This simple Web site allows you to enter a URL and get a translation of an entire Web site.

I tried it with a German site, and within seconds it translated the site into English. The German site I visited had some sections in German and English, so I was able to compare the accuracy of the translation. There were some variations in the two versions, but the general message was the same.

Warning About Dates

Tampa reader Ron Woolley wrote to me after a recent column on Social Security Death Indexes. Woolley shared the lesson he learned about assuming information in any database is correct, including the death index.

He confessed that "up until a few weeks ago, when I found the person I was looking for listed in the death index, I entered the date of death as shown ... and thought nothing of it, assuming that it was the correct date of death."

But he had funeral home cards for some of those deaths. Their dates conflicted with the dates on the death index. He then checked other records he had compiled to compare the Death Index dates with those on cemetery records and death certificates. He found that for 10 of his entries, the dates from cemetery and death certificates matched but were different in the death index.

Woolley's experience is a reminder that secondary records often are incorrect. The Social Security Death Index is a valuable resource, but its records aren't considered to be primary information. Only a death certificate is primary. It is an official document of someone's death, including the cause and subsequent burial.

Remember not to rely on death certificates as being primary for any other information they contain. Death certificates are valuable resources in that they may list dates of birth, names of parents and details of the subsequent burial. But all of this is secondary information.

All family historians need to keep seeking primary information. A death certificate may say your ancestor was born on a particular day. But the original source for a birth date is a birth certificate.

Sharon Tate Moody is a certified genealogist by the Board for Certification of Genealogists. Send genealogy questions and event announcements to her in care of BayLife, The Tampa Tribune, 200 S. Parker St., Tampa FL 33606; or stmoody0720 @mac.com. She reg

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