It is always great when genealogy websites update their collections. What once was a “dead end” might now contain the information you are seeking. Ancestry.com has updated its Yearbook Collection. Your relatives could be in them. You can also find yearbook photos of celebrities.
School yearbooks hold a lot of interesting information about what your relatives or ancestors were like when they were young. You are very likely to find a “school portrait” image within a yearbook. If your relative, or ancestor, was popular, or very active in school activities, there may be more photos of them in their yearbook. Candid photos are fun to look at, and also provide information about what a person was like.
Ancestry.com has updated its collection of High School Yearbooks. This is great for genealogists. If you used this resource in the past, and “hit a brick wall”, it might be a good time to try again. Added content means more potential for you to find the information that you are looking for.
Ancestry.com has added more than 18,000 yearbooks to their U.S. Yearbook Collection. The newly added ones are from 1806 through 2008. They include schools that are (or were) located within the United States. There are yearbooks from junior high schools, high schools, colleges, and universities. This brings the total number of yearbooks in the collection to 53,000. There are around seven million images within the collection.
Yearbook collections are fun because they usually contain at least a few photos of people who are celebrities. If you ever were curious about what a certain person looked like when he or she was a teenager, now is your opportunity to find out.
The newly added yearbooks include a candid photo of Snoop Dogg, (whose real name is Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr.). It appears in the 1988 yearbook for Long Beach Polytechnic High. He was an underclassman when the photo was taken.
Other yearbook photos of celebrities include a 1967 photo of Don Johnson. He was a Senior Prom attendant at South High School that year. There is a photo of Kevin Costner from 1973, which shows him playing varsity basketball at Villa Park High School. You can also find a photo of Lucy Liu, from 1986. She was part of the Big Siblings Club at Stuyvesant High School that year. You can see the photos in the Ancestry.com blog.
The last time Ancestry.com updated their U.S. Yearbook Collection was in August of 2011. That update also included photos of celebrities from when they were younger. Images included Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, Derek Jeter, and Jennifer Lopez.
Image by Tom Woodward on Flickr