Guide
What a 1930s-40s yearbook entry tells you
The parts of a senior entry, what each one can tell you about a relative, and where it can mislead.
A senior entry in a 1930s or 1940s yearbook is short, but each part of it is a clue. This guide goes through the parts a typical entry has, what each can tell you about a person's life, and where it can mislead. The examples come from the fields our person pages show, taken from the printed entry.
Books published after 1930 are not called public domain on this site. For those we say "Published [year]". See the copyright guide.
The name and the nickname
The full name is the form the school had on record, often with a middle name or initial. A nickname appears in quotation marks or on a line of its own. Use the nickname to find the same person in club lists, sports pages and the signatures in other books, and to understand family stories: "Chet" in a story may be Chester in a record. The spelling is what the printer set, and a surname may differ from later records because of a transcription at school or an anglicized spelling.
The course
Many books print the course of study: for example College, General, Commercial or Scientific. A "College" course typically meant preparation for further study, and a "Commercial" course typically meant bookkeeping, stenography and typing for office work. It does not say what the person did afterwards, but it hints at what the family expected, and at what the person could do: a woman on the commercial course may have gone straight to clerical work. Course names differ by school, so read the school's own wording.
Where they came from, and where they were headed
Some books print the grammar school a student came from, and some list where the student was headed: a college, a normal school, a nursing school, a business school or a job. Our pages call these "Came from" and "Headed for". The first links a student to a neighborhood, and to others from the same grammar school. The second points to the next set of records to search, such as college catalogs and alumni directories. A line such as "Headed for Tufts Dental School" (a real example on our site) is a statement of plans in the spring of the senior year, not of what happened. Some students did not go, and some entries say "Undecided".
Activities
The list of clubs, teams and publications is often the richest part. It tells you the person's friends and interests, and each club or team can have its own page in the book, with a photograph and a roster. Our club pages gather the members of a club in one book. In many books a Roman numeral after an activity marks the year of high school in which the student took part (I for the first year), so "Baseball Team, I" means the student played in the first year; check the book's own key. In the early 1940s, activities can include war work, such as an air raid patrol, and that can place a student in time.
The address
Many books print the student's home address. In the 1930s and 1940s that was usually the parents' house. It lets you find the household in the census and in the city directory, find neighbours on the same street, and put the house on a map. Streets were renamed and renumbered over time, so check the address against a directory from the same period. Our street map places people for towns with enough addresses.
The quotation or verse
The line under the portrait is the yearbook's words, often a joke, a friend's tease or a motto. It is not evidence of the person's character or of what happened. It can tell you about the humour of the class and, sometimes, a pastime. Words in italic are the hardest for text recognition to read, so where our page leaves a quotation out, it was dropped on purpose rather than risk misquoting a real person.
Working with an entry
- Copy the entry exactly as printed, including spelling, and note the school, year and scan page.
- List every clue: nickname, course, grammar school, destination, address, activities.
- Take the address to the nearest census and city directory, and use the nickname and activities to search other pages of the same book.
- Use the destination to search college and employer records.
- Record each fact with its source, using the citation formats.
Cautions
- Our pages are read by software from the scan, and a few details in every hundred are wrong. Check the scan before you rely on a detail. How often we are wrong is on the how it is made page.
- An entry does not show a person's whole life, and the book may have been compiled months before graduation.
- A name match is not an identity match. Confirm with a second record.
Last checked 20 October 2026.