High School Yearbooks

Back in June I had the idea to go looking for High School Yearbooks to get more information on grandparents and their siblings. Yearbook photos seem like a great way to get positive identification on other 'mysterious individuals' in family photographs.

This is what I beleived in June:

In Marin County, Tamalpias High School has got to be one of (if not the) oldest still-active schools. My grandmother and her siblings had attended there, and so did my grandfather and his siblings. I have been pining to get over there to search their yearbooks for some of the only pictures I may ever see of them. The trick is going when the school is open, and that would mean taking a day off or being very persuasive in making an appointment. Another benefit of this is being able to pick out who some of the OTHER people are in photos I have. If I can find them in the yearbooks, then I'd have names, and vice versa.

Well, I was somewhat wrong. I researched further online, Tamalpias wasn't built until 1908, and had very small classes even then. The older school was San Rafael High. I have Granny's graduation stuff and had seen her yearbook (Dad has it somewhere) and since the phrase "High School Sweethearts" was used with my grandparent's, I assumed they attended the same school. I guess not.

I went there to the school library, unfortunately right around lunch, but I was able to research quite a bit anyway. I found only Rowena Ambrose, no others and no Winklers, after searching the yearbooks from 1910 to 1932. I did come away with a little better understanding of the young adult scene back then, however. That was something I hadn't thought of before. A few weeks later, Shirley assured me her mother and the others did attend there, but back then you had to pay for your pictures. They may not have made it into the yearbooks. Why then was Rowena the only one?

I now have contact at SRH with the Librarian and school Admin, Christina and Peggy, who are extremely helpful and offering the extra mile. The yearbooks are kept in a vault in the office there, not in the library at all. Peggy is going to enlist the help of a student or two in reseraching those archived volumes, going from a list I faxed to her with the names and birth years (and a guesstimate of when they graduated) of my grand-aunts and uncles... Christina also told me there is an alumni association that has all the old yearbooks, as well, and some public libraries and historical societies may have a year here and there.

There are more yearbook wranglers on the job, too. Janet from Westwood High in Lassen County is looking for Jeanette Stewart. They have cume' files on students still dating way back from the "old" Westwood High, which burned or had to be moved in the 1960's.