It feels like I haven’t posted in weeks and it feels like I missed a week or two somewhere. However, that isn’t the case, and I’m just in time for the latest topic for the 52 Ancestors Challenge, “Yearbook”.
It inspired me to pull out my own yearbooks and share them with our kids. Happily, they did not find my high school photos to be funny or old fashioned. Rather, our seven-year-old, looking at an old Apple II in a photo taken in the computer lab, exclaimed “is that a computer?!?”
(This is not me in grade nine, baby. ♬♪♪)
I never received my copy of my grade nine yearbook, even though I paid for it. I’m particularly annoyed by the lack of a grade nine yearbook, because The Barenaked Ladies’ Grade Nine – which is pretty much set at about the same time I was in grade nine – perfectly describes life that year. Happily, they tore down the awful place where I started grade nine shortly after I moved, so I take solace in that fact. I much more enjoyed the school in our new town.
I love yearbooks. I discovered my parents’ yearbooks in a closet when I was about nine-years-old. I read the hell out of them, I practically had them memorized. I loved seeing how my parents looked when they were in high school and finding my aunts and uncles in their yearbooks. My parents were always happy to indulge my questions about their high school experiences.
| My mom’s grade twelve yearbook, with her grad photo. Her high school seems to have been adverse to alphabetical order. | My father’s grade six yearbook. I was surprised that his school had yearbooks available for grades prior to high school. I assume it was because his school went from grades one to twelve. |
I’ve also found yearbooks to be a very source for family history research. In addition to my aunts and uncles who appeared in my parents’ yearbooks, I’ve found many of my cousins in yearbooks available online. As my parents are the oldest and second oldest of their families, I’ve found their siblings in later editions of their schools’ yearbooks that are also available online. As a lot of my extended family lives in Alberta, a great resource for me has been the Bruce Haig Collection of the University of Alberta Library.
In addition, I have found relatives in university yearbooks, which has helped round out my knowledge about them. This has been of particular help on my wife’s side of the family. Her family has a much earlier post-secondary academic history. For my mother, her brother and sister were the first generation to go to university. For my father’s side, I was the first to attend university. However, my wife has quite a few ancestors going quite a way back who had university educations. For some of them, I’ve found the Internet Archive to be a great resource for some of their yearbooks.
For example, one of my wife’s great grandfathers graduated from the University of Toronto Medical School in 1906. Other than during World War I, when he served as a Captain in the Canadian Army Medical Corps, my wife’s great grandfather spent his entire career working at Toronto General Hospital specializing in internal medicine. My knowledge of his university career was sketchy until I found, among other things, the yearbook for the year he graduated with his medical degree.
A helpful companion to yearbooks are university convocation programs. Many universities now have them available online. I’ve found a lot of information about many members of my and my wife’s extended family through those programs. While I still have my hard copies, I’ve even found the programs for both of my degrees, as well as of many other family members, published on the University of British Columbia’s website.
Meanwhile, I had intended to post an image of my photo in my yearbook for my graduating year. While perfectly harmless at the time, my write-up did not age well, so I’ll be posting just the photo. As well, they always posted the grads’ baby photos in the yearbook. To this day, decades later, I am still unhappy with the fact the yearbook committee lost the original of the photo I submitted, so all I have now is the copy I’ve made from the yearbook.
A Deck of Ancestors 
Here’s a bit of an afterthought that I had after posting this blog.
As I mentioned, I pulled out my own yearbooks during this week’s challenge and was surprised to see who did – and did not – sign my yearbook.
The best/oddest signature in my grade 12 yearbook was by my English Lit teacher. He wrote in ancient Greek, but wouldn’t tell me what it said. Many years later, a university friend of mine who went on to become a professor who knows, among other things, ancient Greek, translated it for me. The answer was both underwhelming and amusing. My teacher had written, “To a student of Caledonia” (referring to the name of my high school). It was exactly like him to have done that.
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