- Find a yearbook online through sites like Classmates.com, FamilySearch.org, or E-yearbook.com.
- To search for a specific yearbook online, type the name of your school or university, the date, location, and/or the name of a classmate into the search engine.
- Contact your school’s media center or library to see if they have additional copies of the yearbook you’re looking for.
Using an Online Search Tool
Use an online yearbook finder tool. Online services like Classmates.com, FamilySearch.org, and E-yearbook.com allow you to search their archives for physical scans of yearbooks as well as photographs, dates, and student names. Most of these services are free (or require a small subscription fee), and we’ll walk you through all the pros and cons of each one down below, including: MyHeritage.com Ancestry.com Findmypast.com Google Books HathiTrust Internet Archive
Create an account to access yearbooks online. To search the digital archives on the tool, make an account on your preferred site by providing your name and email address. If there is a subscription fee to use the tool, enter your payment information to finish setting up your account.
Search for people and images in the yearbook with the tool. If you’re looking for a specific classmate, search their full name, as it appears in the yearbook, using the search tool. You can also look at images, dates, and class lists in the yearbook by downloading a digitized copy of it through your preferred search tool.
Online Yearbook Services & School Records
Classmates.com Launched in 1995, Classmates is a social networking site with over 470,000 elementary and high school yearbooks in the U.S. Once you sign up for a free account, you can access any yearbook on their site, and they even offer physical copies of some yearbooks if you see the “Own this yearbook today” button in the upper right corner of the page. If you upgrade to a paid membership, you can message former classmates and see the names of users who have viewed your profile. Paid membership options include: 2 years for $48, 1 year for $30, or 3 months for $10.80.
FamilySearch.org Although most people use FamilySearch to trace their family history, it includes free access to 500,000+ digitized books, including yearbooks. Just navigate to their digital library and type in the name of your school’s yearbook, along with any relevant keywords like the city, state, year, and/or the name of a specific classmate. If your yearbook is available on FamilySearch, it will appear on the results page, and you can click on the photo to view it online at no charge. FamilySearch also provides access to user-uploaded media items, such as school “souvenir” booklets from the late 1800s and early 1900s: all you have to do is type in your school name and year into their Find Memories tool.
MyHeritage.com While MyHeritage is primarily used to track genealogy, it also offers an extensive collection of colorized high school and college yearbooks. You can type in the name of your school or university on the home page, then add the location or other relevant keywords to narrow down your results. Your first result is free, but you need a paid subscription to browse multiple yearbooks. You can always sign up for a free 14-day trial of their paid subscription, or pay $189 per year ($129 for the first year) for unlimited access.
E-yearbook.com As a family-owned and operated site, E-yearbook digitizes old middle school, high school, college, and military yearbooks. You can access millions of yearbooks for free, but you need to pay for a subscription to look at the pages up close. To find your yearbook, type in the name of your school into the search engine on the home page, or browse their entire collection by state. Paid membership options include: $19.95 for 1 year or $4.95 per month (with a minimum 2-month commitment billed upfront). You can also access high school and college yearbooks from other countries by clicking on the “International Schools” button on the left side of the home page (located under “Find Yearbook by State”).
Ancestry.com Most people use Ancestry to delve into their family tree, but they also offer access to 450,000+ yearbooks in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. You’ll need a subscription to access their database, but you can always sign up for a free 14-day trial. To find a yearbook, enter a name, year of birth, city, state, and/or the name of your school, then leave any fields blank that you don’t have information for. Paid subscription plans include: $24.99 per month for U.S. records (or $119 for 6 months), or $39.99 per month for U.S. and international records (or $169 for 6 months).
Findmypast.com If you’re searching for a specific person in Ireland or the U.K., Findmypast offers a huge database of school-related records. Just type in the name of the person into their Schools & Education search engine, along with the location, year, and any other helpful keywords. To access these records, you need to sign up for a paid membership of $13.33 per month or $159.99 per year.
Google Books With free access to millions of digitized books, Google Books provides yearbooks and alumni records from around the world. Just type in your yearbook in the search engine, along with any relevant keywords like the name of a specific classmate or the location of the school. You can view the book for free if it’s in the public domain, or look at a few select pages if it’s copyrighted. If your yearbook doesn’t show up in the results, search for phrases and expressions in quotations marks, or type in a different combination of keywords. For example, if “1989 Taylor High School yearbook” doesn’t pull up anything, you could type in “Taylor High School 1989 Alumni” or “1989 THS yearbook, Texas."
HathiTrust Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a free digital archive that provides access to some yearbooks from the early 1900s. To look for a specific yearbook or alumni directory, type in any relevant keywords into their search engine, then select the “Full-text” button to scan your keywords throughout their entire database.
Internet Archive The Internet Archive is a free database that has over 59,000 results if you type in the term “yearbook.” While it might be trickier to find a specific yearbook, you can always try typing in different combinations of keywords to narrow down the results. Try searching for a yearbook by the name of your school or university, or type in the publisher if you know who produced the book.
Contacting the School
Reach out to the school’s media center. The media center at the high school is usually in charge of keeping copies of previous yearbooks. Look for a contact number for the media center at the school online, or call the front desk at the school and ask to be connected to the media center department. The media center is often run by students under the supervision of a teacher, so you might have to speak to the supervising teacher to ask for the yearbooks you are looking for. Alternatively, visit the school's library to see if they can help you find the yearbook.
Contact the school’s yearbook advisor. Some schools have a yearbook club that is run by an advisor or an editor. You can contact the school and ask to speak with the yearbook advisor so you can request the yearbooks you are looking for. If you can't take a physical copy of the yearbook, the advisor may let you photograph or scan any specific pages you want. Some schools digitize their yearbooks, so ask the yearbook advisor if you can access the school’s digital archives.
Talk to former classmates to see if they still have their yearbooks. If you're trying to find a physical copy of a yearbook, contact former friends or classmates to see if they have a copy you can look through. If you don't have their phone number or contact information, search their name on social media and send them a message to reconnect with them. Alternatively, check if your classmates have an alumni organization or Facebook group so you can connect with them online.
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