Yearbooks are a great way to chime travel into the past and
enjoy seeing some old photos of yourself as well as your
relatives. So, let's take a moment and dive into Ancestry's
newest update to their yearbook collection.
Howdy, I'm Devon Noel Lee and I'm so glad you're joining us
on Family History Fanatics where we help you understand
your DNA, climb your family tree, and write your ancestors
stories along the way. We do this through YouTube videos,
e-conferences, as well as books. Be sure to check out the
description for all the details. So, let's dive in and
talk about yearbooks. How you can explore them and find some
answers to your research questions for your ancestors as
well as yourself. When you want to access the ancestry yearbook
collection, you needed to go up to the top to search. After you
click the drop down menu, all collections, you'll come to
this page. Now, after you click on search all collections, you
come to this page. Now, I have recently viewed the yearbook
collection. So, it is appearing right here in my recent viewed
collection but you're going to want to come down here to the
school directories section right here and then click on
school directories and church histories and then you're
going to scroll down here to US school yearbooks. Once you're
on this page, the fun can begin. So, let's go ahead and
start broad and then we can narrow things down. The first
thing I want to do is to go ahead and search Geisler. When
you start broad what you can do is you can then narrow it down
to more specifics but what if your ancestor is in a place
that you did not expect when you start broad you might be
able to pick them up somewhere. So we're going to narrow down
bit by bit by bit to get to different cool topics that we
will want to so let's say we want to find all of the George
Geiszler. I typed Geisler Geiszler. The George Geiszlers
that are in the yearbook collection now you will always
want to check back often because ancestry will be adding
new yearbooks as they become available so just because your
ancestor is not in a yearbook right now does not mean they
won't be there in the future as we scroll down we can see that
we just have all of the George Geiszlers and there's a lot in
Oregon and Delaware but my George Geiszlers were from
Ohio. So now I can go ahead and scroll down and look for Ohio.
So once I put George Geiszler in Ohio I'm just going to see the
George's from Ohio. And I finally found a hit. Now this
is George Geiszler from West High School in Columbus and
he's actually a junior. We can go ahead and then go view the
record and notice I've already saved this to my family tree.
But I'm going to go ahead and show you that. Ancestry will
highlight Your person as well as their name right there. And
then you can see his classmates. You can go a few
pages forward and backward. You can also dive a little deeper
and see here are the seniors that year. And look by coming
hopping around here I'm on page five have a picture what the
school look like back then how cool is that so let's go ahead
and explore further now another way you can search is you can
search by location to see what yearbooks might be available
for the place that you're researching so I'm going to
search for Houston, Harris County, Texas and I'm for just
going to see if that location appears in the database so with
the place like Houston it should if you have a smaller
location not so much for now but notice we have a wide wide
range of topics from University of Houston, Houston- Reagan High
School, Adobe High School from 1950, 1960, 1997 so that's really
good now what I want to do is I want to see if the school Elsik
High School is in the database so I can go ahead and type in
Elsik High School and I'm going to go ahead and do an exact
match and type and press the search button. And notice I
have entries for Elsik High School there in Houston, Texas
so then let's say okay I had some friends that went to
Elsik High School between 1990 and 1994, so I'm going to go
ahead and pick a year in the middle 1992 and do plus or
minus two years and see what happens so we have somebody
with the last name Elsik they're over in Florida. Now,
what happened? Well, Ancestry tried to give you a result but
it doesn't look like Elsik High School for the years 1990
through 1994 have yearbooks in their the ancestry collection
right now. If you want to know how to donate your yearbook to
Ancestry or a yearbook you have for a relative go ahead and
hang on to the end of the video and I will tell you how. Now,
instead of looking for Elsik High School, I can look for the
rival high school. In this case I know that my brother went to
this high school so let's go see what he looked like back
then. So he went to Elsik High School between not 1895, but
1985 that's probably the midpoint of when he went there.
And unfortunately the search doesn't always work correctly.
So if you get some strange results even though you put
these filters in then I actually go back to the
beginning of the yearbook search page clear out the
search and start over now often it pays not to have an exact
match selected so let's go ahead and do David Geiszler
Houston, Harris County, Texas Alief Hasting Hastings High
School and there he is when I just search for Hastings High
School I get a lot of strange results but once I finally put
in Alief Hastings High School there is my brother?
Don't we look alike? Okay. So now there's some other things
that you might want to do. So my brother had a friend whose
name was George. And I don't remember his last name. But I
do remember what he looked like. So I'm just going to type
in the name George. Again I'm going to do Houston, Harris
County, Texas. Alief Hastings. High school.
And type search
and I do have that 1990 again, but the George I'm looking for
should have been intending there between in the late 80s
so I'm going to put 8 1985 to for two years and let's see if
I can filter this down to the George I'm looking for and sure
enough this gentleman right here
is the George that I was looking for and I could go
ahead and use this George to go ahead and enhance my brother's
story about who his best friend was for the drumline for the
Hastings Bears. Go Bears. Now, after you find a record that
you want to save a yearbook entry that you want to save to
your family tree. How do you go about doing that? Well, this is
my dad cousin Anita. Anita has passed away but I know that
this is her and she attended West High School in Columbus,
Ohio. Honor about nineteen sixty-six and her birthday was
very close to nineteen fifty. So, all I have to do is in this
profile entry is press save, save to someone in your tree
and type her name, Anita. So, I can go ahead and use this form
to my her information over here. I know that that is her
correct name. She was born about 1950 and then if I didn't
have this information before, over here on the right, then it
will be new information. Um right now, I could overwrite
it. Here's one little thing that I like to do. I like to
clean up the locations and make them all the same. So, there's
one way to go. All I did was highlight, copy, pick,
overwrite anytime you have any record that you're attaching
and you want to fix a location to make it more standardized
city county state and country you can fix it right there
super easy alright so that's a bonus tip go ahead and save to
your tree and then I'm going to have this entry of the school
yearbooks for Anita so I hope you in that exploration of
yearbooks that can be found in Ancestry. com. If you have any
more questions about how to find your relatives or yourself
in Ancestry's yearbook collections, be sure to ask
them in the comment section below. Now, how do you donate a
yearbook that you may have in your home for yourself or a
relative so that your yearbook can be included on the Ansa
website. Well, the very first thing you have to do is make
sure that you never want to have that book back because
ancestry will accept the yearbook that you don't mind
them ripping up the spine so that they can rapidly scan
those yearbooks in. So, yes, the book will be damaged once
it's done. So, if you have no problem donating the book, then
you can contact Ancestry's record collections. Go ahead
and just find the contact us section on ancestry and find
out the procedures to donate your books to make sure that
your ancestors and you are in the collection for the
generations to come. So my name is Devon Noel Lee. I hope you
enjoyed this video. Be sure to hit the subscribe button so
that you never miss another episode and check out any of
these videos that you see here.