About The Class Album

The Class Album is an archive of the people in American high school yearbooks published in 1930 and earlier, starting with Cambridge, Malden, Arlington, Melrose, Saugus and Everett in Massachusetts.

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. 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) and Boston Public Library, via the Internet Archive. City directories: Cambridge Public Library. Maps: US Census Bureau. Each page names its own source.

Contact

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