Editorial standards and corrections

What we publish

A person gets a page only when a published work from 1945 or earlier prints their name and, in most cases, their portrait, and when the name and school we show can be checked against that page. The work can be a school or college yearbook, a war roll, a biographical volume or a library portrait collection.

• Every page carries its source: the item, the page number and the rights basis, with a link to the scan. A record without a source is not published.
• Open sources only. Scans from libraries and archives that make them freely available. We do not use Ancestry, Fold3, Find a Grave, Newspapers.com or Classmates.com, and we do not scrape paywalled or licensed collections.
• Nothing after 1945. For books published from 1931 to 1945 we have not checked copyright renewal; the pages say "Published YYYY", not "public domain". Works of 1930 or earlier are public domain in the United States.
• Each page has to add something to the scan it came from: the cropped portrait, structured facts, links to classmates and neighbours, school and town context. Pages that would only repeat the item page are held back or marked noindex. Most pages with no printed fact beyond name, school and year are kept out of search engines' indexes; they stay on the site for people who search by name.

How we decide something is right

• A wrong name on a real person's page is the worst mistake we can make, so records below our confidence threshold go to a review queue and wait for a person.
• A portrait goes on a page only after a second check that it shows one person whose face is consistent with the first name. Whole books are held when their face-and-name disagreement rate is too high.
• We leave a field out when we doubt it. A page without a motto is better than a page that misquotes a real person. Details that fail our cleaning rules are dropped, not guessed.
• We separate what the source says from what we infer. A birth date, address or club is "as printed". When two people share a surname and address on the same page we say they "very likely" are brother and sister; when we link a household from a city directory we say only that the directory lists these people at that address, never "father" or "mother".
• Notable people are identified by evidence, not by name alone. A page says it is the same person as a Wikipedia subject only when at least one printed fact (for example the exact birth date) matches, and the page shows that evidence. A name match without a second fact is not enough to use the words "later known as".
• Face links across photographs are made only when caption and image agree on the number of people in each row and the face is verified against the senior portrait.
• Audits. We re-check samples against the original pages and publish the results on How this archive is made.

People who may still be alive

Some people in 1940s yearbooks are alive today and are in their late nineties or older. Every page shows only what the book or the city directory printed, and nothing from paid records or social media. We do not show phone numbers or email addresses for anyone. If you are the person, or a relative, and would like a page changed or removed, say so below and we will act without asking for a reason.

Corrections

How to ask. Use "Something wrong on this page?" at the foot of any person page (name misspelled, photo belongs to someone else, wrong school or year, duplicate, a fact or story to add, remove this page), or write to hello@theclassalbum.com with the page link. You do not need an account, and your email is optional.

What we do. We read the report against the original scan, not against the other reports. Nothing a visitor submits is published until a person has checked it.

How long. We read every report, usually within a week, and reply when you gave an email address. When a correction changes a page's address, the old address forwards to the new one.

Removal. A family member can ask for a page to be taken down at any time. We do it promptly, give no argument and ask for no reason.

If a name was wrong on a page that search engines indexed, we update the page and resubmit the sitemap; changes appear in search results on the search engines' own schedule.

Copyright concerns

If you believe a work shown here is not in the public domain or should not be, write to us with the page link. We review it promptly and take the page down while we do.

Independence and money

The site is run by one person and has no institutional backing. Some outbound links (eBay and Amazon today, genealogy services later) are affiliate links; they are marked "sponsored", never change what a page says, and no one can pay to appear in the archive or to change an entry. Visitor reports are not used to sell anything. See how the site is funded and privacy.

Use of software

Names, portraits and printed details are read from scans by software, including large language models. The page text that quotes a yearbook is the yearbook's own words as the software read them, which can contain recognition errors; summaries of notable people are written from Wikipedia and labelled with its licence. See how it is made and how accurate it is.

Last updated: 20 October 2026. Run by one person. Contact: hello@theclassalbum.com.