Find School Yearbooks Online

School yearbooks, immortalize how we looked and what we did in high school or college. Whether we looked goofy or cool, that photo is there forever. And they document what clubs, sports, or other activities we were involved in.  And for our ancestors, too! There is a significant amount of genealogy information that can be found in school yearbooks. For a detailed list of information that you can find in old yearbooks, go to Genealogy in Yearbooks. Below is a list of the major providers of online school yearbooks.

  • Ancestry.com has a nice school yearbook collection to search for. I would encourage you to check out the schools and years available in the “Browse This Collection” section on the right side of the page in order to look for a specific yearbook.  Ancestry requires a subscription. They have over 500,000 yearbooks – that’s yearbooks, not schools.
  • My Heritage has a huge collection of yearbooks that can be searched. They have over 250,000 yearbooks, again yearbooks, not schools. They also have the Alumni Lists originally provided by Distant Cousin. Some are transcribed and some are scanned page images. My Heritage requires a subscription. WorldVitalRecords (now owned by My Heritage); school yearbooks are included as well.
  • The last “big player” is Classmates.com which has a collection of over 470,000 yearbooks where a reprint can be purchased. I will leave it up to you to figure out how to save an image or two. It can be accomplished. You can view the yearbooks by browsing. You do not need to have a subscription, but you are limited as to how many pages you can view.
  • The Ancestor Hunt has yearbook links from 15,300 schools in the U.S. and Canada. It is free. 
  • The Internet Archive has over 74,000 results if you search for the keyword “yearbooks”. Definitely worth searching if you know the school or association. By and large, the Internet Archive yearbooks are included in The Ancestor Hunt’s list of links.
  • E-Yearbook.com has a sizable collection available by subscription. You can view it by registering. They don’t advertise the number of yearbooks, but it is sizable.  They also have a nice collection of Military Yearbooks and Navy Cruise books.
  • Skalooza is interesting.  It has a good number of yearbooks available; it is easy to register, and the interface is easy to use. Quite honestly, I have had difficulty finding things on this site.
  • Old Yearbooks collection was a combination of scanned and transcribed. It is a combination of class lists, random class pictures, and a list of links, many of which are in Classmates. It is now defunct.
  • Dead Fred has a collection of photos from old yearbooks that you might want to browse.
  • Don’s List has a nice collection of old yearbooks and alumni association directories, many from Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. There are over 100 schools.
  • Ebay and Amazon have a lot of old yearbooks for sale.
  • GenealogyToday has over 1.700 yearbooks and is a subscription-only service. Recent attempts at accessing this site have been unsuccessful.
  • There are a few link-only sites, such as Cyndi’s ListLinkpendium, and Access Genealogy The number of links is in the low hundreds, although it is difficult to know Linkpendium’s.
  • Google Books has a wide variety of yearbooks available. Many are from an association and are not related to schools. Worth a search. Unfortunately. most are not viewable.
  • Hathitrust has a couple of hundred full-view school yearbooks. Usually, there are only a couple of years available, and many are in the early 1900s.

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