19 Places Where You Can Access Old Yearbooks Online – The Ancestor Hunt (2024)

Primarily a North American phenomenon historically, the first yearbook published was the Yale Banner in the early 1800s.

I encourage you to research old yearbooks, and not just for yourself and close relatives. What about your ancestors? They went to school too (at least some of them in the last 200 years). And they belonged to clubs and associations outside of school.

Below is a list of websites that offer digitized yearbooks:

Ancestry.comhas a nice school yearbook collection to search. 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 Heritagehas 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 byDistant Cousin. Some are transcribed and some are scanned page images. My Heritage requires a subscription. World Vital Records(owned by My Heritage), has 115 schools.

The last “big player” isClassmates.comwhich hasa 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 17,500 schools in the U.S. and Canada. It is free.

TheInternet Archivehas over 82,000 results if you search for the keyword “yearbooks”. 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.comhas 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.

Skaloozais interesting. It has a good number of yearbooks available; it is easyto register, and the interface is easy to use. Quite honestly, I have had difficulty finding things on this site.

Old Yearbookscollection is 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 to Classmates. This site appears to be dead.

Dead Fredhas a collection of photos from old yearbooks that you might want to browse.

Don’s Listhas a nice collection of old yearbooks and alumni association directories, many from Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. There are over 100 schools.

EbayandAmazonhave a lot of old yearbooks for sale.

GenealogyTodayhas over 1.700 yearbooks and is a subscription-only service. This site appears to be dead.

Thereare a few link-only sites, such asCyndi’s List,Linkpendium, and Access Genealogy.The number of links is in the low hundreds, although it is difficult to know Linkpendium’s.

Google Bookshas 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.

Hathitrusthas a couple of hundred full-view school yearbooks. Usually, there are only a couple of years available and many are in the early 1900’s.

Download the Quicksheet PDF

I have put together a Quick Reference Guide that has 19 different websites where you can find digitized yearbooks, as well as class lists and alumni and reunion materials. Accessing these sites will provide you with much more genealogical material, and some interesting ancestor stories!

To obtain the one-page Quicksheet pdf for easy reference, you can download it by clicking on the Download button:

For all the previously published Quick Reference Guides, click on QuickSheets

Genealogy QuickSheets – Frequently Asked Questions