With over 480,000 yearbooks in its collection, Classmates® is the United States’ #1 digital yearbook archive, with yearbooks spanning every decade as far back as the 1880s.
But how has Classmates acquired all of these yearbooks from every state around the country? And how does the collection of elementary, middle, high school, and college yearbooks continue to expand?
Here’s a full breakdown of how Classmates has spent decades to preserve U.S. school history by digitizing yearbooks, often with support from the very people and schools featured in the yearbooks.
Key Takeaways
| – Classmates built the U.S.’s largest digital yearbook archive of over 480,000 yearbooks through contributions from everyday Americans, school partnerships, and estate sale purchases. – Submitting a yearbook permanently preserves it for historical purposes while giving former classmates the ability to browse it online or order a physical reprint. – Searching the archive is free, and submitting is simple: Classmates provides a shipping label, digitizes it, and mails it back. |
Where Do Classmates’ Yearbooks Come From?
For over a decade, Classmates has acquired real physical yearbooks from elementary, middle, high schools, and colleges in communities across the United States, scanned them, and uploaded them to its online collection.
The current collection of more than 480,000 digital yearbooks (that continues to grow!) has come from:
- Submissions from everyday Americans
- Collaborations with schools, libraries, and historical societies
- Direct purchases from estate sales and eBay auctions
Learn more about how this decades long process has resulted in almost half a million yearbooks digitally preserved:
People Lending Their Yearbooks to Classmates
People in possession of yearbooks not already added to the collection can submit their own yearbook to Classmates to be digitized for free. Classmates will receive, scan and upload any U.S. yearbook for free (that meets its submission standards) before sending it back.
Often, senders are digitizing their own yearbook(s), those of their relatives, or other vintage yearbooks that came into their possession.
Why Share Your Yearbook With Classmates?
There’s plenty of reasons that Americans feel inspired to have their yearbooks scanned and digitized by Classmates, including:
- Historic preservation: once a yearbook is uploaded to Classmates, it is permanently archived for historical and genealogical purposes. Every yearbook captures exactly what life was like in that year and community. Class photos, senior quotes, and every handwritten yearbook message are telling records of history.
- Access for their schoolmates: between moves, damage, or simple misplacement, not every one of your peers still has their old yearbook to this day. By uploading your old yearbook, you’re ensuring that anyone from your class can browse it online or order a physical yearbook reprint for themselves.
- Access for loved ones: friends, relatives, etc. can finally search for their loved ones’ photos from back in high school. Anyone that is interested in you and your schoolmates’ past can browse the yearbook.
School, Library, and Historical Societies
Local schools, libraries, and historical societies recognize the value in digital preservation and creating a “time capsule” of their school and community over their years in the form of yearbook photos.
Classmates works directly with schools and libraries to digitize their community’s yearbooks.
Estate Sales, Auctions, & eBay
The Classmates team is constantly scouring the Internet, estate sales, and auctions for yearbooks that are not currently in the collection, and purchasing them directly to be digitally preserved for decades to come.
How to Send in Your Yearbook to Classmates
Are you interested in submitting your own yearbooks to Classmates for historic preservation? Start by searching the digital collection to make sure yours isn’t already available! From the yearbook landing page, you can select your state, town name, and school name to see all of the yearbooks that are available.
Not seeing yours? As long as your physical yearbooks meet Classmates’ eligibility and submission standards, then you are good to start the submission process. Reasons that prevent a yearbook from qualifying for submission include:
- eligible year
- water damage
- torn/loose pages
- yearbooks with their spine detached
- missing or damaged covers
- pet or rodent damage
- excessive writing over yearbook photos
- contains obscene, pornographic, graphic or gratuitous violence, illegal drug paraphernalia, or is derogatory, demeaning, malicious, defamatory, abusive, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, or otherwise objectionable content.
Simply provide your personal details (State, City, School Name, and Grad Year), confirm that you’re ready to submit now (you can have an option to select that you need more time) and Classmates will provide you with a shipping label to mail it. Once sent, received, and processed, Classmates will upload it online and mail it back to you. Keep in mind, digital access may not be immediate.
You can submit non-copyrighted elementary, middle, high school, or college yearbooks for digitization.
How to Search for Your Yearbook on Classmates
There’s a good chance your own yearbook is included in Classmates’ digital archive of over 480,000 yearbooks.
To start your search, you can register for Classmates for free. Once you’ve set up your account and registered under your high school and grad year, you’ll be able to see if your high school yearbook is available right from the homepage.
Searching for yearbooks from your other schools, or those of loved ones? Use the yearbook search feature to look for the high school to see if we have the yearbooks in the collection.
Beyond Yearbooks: Classmates’ Commitment to High School Preservation
In addition to continually digitizing yearbooks, Classmates has over 90 million U.S. school alumni registered to its social media platform, many of which have uploaded old photos of themselves. These registered alumni are grouped by their high school and grad year into a class list. The photos and memories they provide help support Classmates in its mission to preserve U.S. school history from across the United States.
And of course, as the leading reunion planning website, Classmates also acts as a digital archive of high school reunions that have occurred over the last several decades.
Did You Know: Classmates Helps to Power Ancestry’s Yearbook Search Too
If you’re equally as curious how Ancestry has accumulated part of its yearbook collection: look no further! With Classmates’ commitment to documenting high school history, it has partnered with Ancestry to help provide the leading genealogy platform with access to some of its yearbook collection. So, much of Ancestry’s yearbook search function is powered by Classmates!
Tap Into U.S. School History with the Classmates Yearbook Collection
Search the vast collection of over 480,000 digitized yearbooks for yourself. Sign up for Classmates to browse for free, and upgrade to CM+ to access every yearbook in full. You can also reach out to other school alumni from your high school and other schools across the U.S. and plan your class reunion for free.
Get started today!
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