About The Class Album

The Class Album is an archive of the people in American school yearbooks and similar published rolls from 1945 and earlier. Most of it is Massachusetts, from Cambridge, Newton and Springfield to Brockton, New Bedford and Salem, with a growing number of schools in other states.

These yearbooks have been scanned by public libraries and are freely available at the Internet Archive, but the names in them exist only inside the page images. A search engine cannot find them, so a family searching for a grandmother's name finds nothing. We read each name, portrait and entry out of the scans and give every graduate a page of their own.

What is on a page

• The portrait, cut from the yearbook page, and the entry as the yearbook printed it: nickname, home address, the school they came from, where they were headed, their clubs and teams, and the yearbook's own words about them.
• The people they were connected to: brothers and sisters at the same address, neighbours on the same street, classmates, clubmates and teammates, and the group photographs they appear in.
• Where the city directory of the time lists their household, who lived there and what they did for a living.
• A link to the original scanned page, so every fact can be checked against the source.

How it is made, and how we keep it accurate

Names and faces are read from the scans by software, and that software makes mistakes. A wrong name or a stranger's face on a real person's page is the worst error this archive can make, so nothing is published on the software's word alone (how it works, with the audit numbers). Every portrait is checked by a second, independent process; whole yearbooks whose layout confuses the software are held back; names that look misread go to a human review queue; and a group-photo face is linked to a person only when their senior portrait confirms the match. About a third of everything read so far is still held back for these reasons.

If you find a mistake, please tell us — we fix it.

Sources

Yearbook scans: Cambridge Public Library, Malden Public Library, Robbins Library (Arlington), Melrose Public Library, Saugus Public Library, Frederick E. Parlin Memorial Library (Everett), Boston Public Library and many other public and school libraries, via the Internet Archive. City directories: public libraries in Cambridge, Newton, Springfield, Salem, Arlington and elsewhere. Maps: US Census Bureau. Each page names its own source.

How the site is funded

The archive is an independent project with no institutional backing. It is paid for out of pocket and, where it can be, by small commissions: some links (to eBay and Amazon today, to genealogy services later) are affiliate links. They are marked “sponsored”, they never change what a page says, and no one can pay to appear in the archive or have an entry changed.

Contact

Write to hello@theclassalbum.com. We are especially glad to hear from families.