Send In Your Yearbook

You may know that Classmates has the largest digital yearbook archive in the world (over 300,000 at last count). It’s an incredible slice of history when you think about it: a giant time capsule of teen life in the United States during many different eras. With the volume of yearbooks that we currently have, we kind of like to think of ourselves as experts on high school culture.

However, our quest is far from complete. We’re always looking for more books.

Interested in contributing to the archive and sharing your yearbook with the Classmates community (if we don’t already have it)?

You can choose to either donate your book or loan it to us for scanning. If you decide you’d like it back (completely understandable!), we’ll need to hold onto it for about 4 to 6 weeks.

A couple of things to note:

• We can only accept yearbooks from high schools in the United States.
• We’ll return your book un-scanned if it’s in bad condition or if it simply has too much writing in it (we know – getting your yearbook signed was always the best part!).
• You must be the rightful owner of any book you send us.

Click here to get the process started and send in your yearbook today.

Some interesting facts about our yearbook archive:

• It all started in 2010, with 5,000 yearbooks (and no idea of how large our archive would eventually grow). Here’s a look back at an early video where we talk about the project: The Yearbook Project – YouTube
• The oldest volume in our collection, from all the way back in 1886, is from Central High School, in Manchester, NH.
• We have hundreds of celebrities in our archive (many of whom are already featured on the blog in their own individual celebrity yearbook pages).
• The oldest celebrity yearbook that we currently have is John Wayne’s 1925 senior yearbook from Glendale High School (look for the kid nicknamed “Duke”).
• The states with the most yearbooks in our collection: Texas, California, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio.
• Our collection covers over 90% of all high schools in the United States.
• The archive gets about a million visitors a month, with the average person leafing through any one yearbook’s pages for almost half an hour.
• The oddest thing found in a submitted yearbook so far? A dried pot leaf (circa 1973).

Here’s that link again, if you’ve been inspired to add to our collection.

For an entertaining look inside the archive, check out our blog post, Fun With Yearbook Searches.