September 19, 2025
Finding pictures of relatives is an important goal for most genealogists. Unfortunately, it’s not always a simple goal to achieve.
Pictures of ancestors who lived before the era of photography frequently never existed or are lost to time. For our relatives who lived after photography became commonplace in the mid to late nineteenth century, at least a few photos usually exist. Finding them can be the tricky part.
Genealogists often contact distant relatives in the hope that they may have photos of common ancestors. Online trees such as Family Search Family Tree are another common source of pictures.
School yearbooks and annuals are also worth checking for twentieth century (and even some late nineteenth century) ancestors. I enjoy finding youthful images of my family members, and yearbooks are an important source of these kinds of photos.
Ancestry has recently uploaded eight million plus new photos and other school records to their website. Ancestry has long had a good collection of yearbook photos, but yesterday I found photos of my family I’d never seen before. I was especially interested to see some photos from university annuals. I found several pictures of one of my dad’s cousins who attended the University of Wyoming, for example. Ancestry is a pay site, but many libraries have subscriptions which you can access for free.
Classmates.com is another website that features yearbook pictures. Searches are free, but you will need a subscription to download photos.
If you can’t find the yearbooks you need online, you may be able to find them offline. State archives often have copies of yearbooks, particularly ones from state universities.
One of my favorite ways to obtain yearbook photos is to visit the schools themselves. I check in advance to make sure that the schools have the yearbooks I need and that they will allow a visit. In my experience, most schools are happy to have visitors and will even dig out old yearbooks from storage if you ask before you show up.
The rewards of yearbook research are worth the effort. Using a combination of online and offline research, I was able to find youthful photos of my mother and her eight siblings. My grandparents were poor and struggled to support their large brood. Studio photographs and even home snapshots were scarce. I don’t know if the siblings could afford to buy their yearbooks, but they did appear in them. Because of that, I now have photos I wouldn’t have found elsewhere.
Carol Stetser
Researcher
Larimer County Genealogical Society