If you have yearbooks from Chicago institutions that would add to the Chicago History Museum’s collection, please check the Yearbook Finding Aid for the school and the years. If we do not already have copies, then you can fill out the Online Collection Donation Form.
More information can be found on the Collections Donations page.
Related collections include:
At a time when higher education was not as common as today, schools produced yearbooks to share with family, friends, and the public to inform them about the experience of attending school and the education provided to students.
Yearbooks included descriptive overviews of the school and detailed information on school history, course subjects or specialties, and socialization activities. Yearbooks focused more on the institution's leadership and faculty qualifications than individual student achievements.
Photographs and graphics are in black and white.
The inclusion of photography during these years varied depending on the size and budget of the institution. Photography was expensive and printing photographs required different paper types within a single book. Individual, posed portraits were often reserved for school administrators or faculty and graduating seniors.
Not all photographs included captions. Group photographs of classes, clubs or athletic teams, or faculty might have no caption or only list last names adjacent to the image without identifying individuals.
If it was not possible to have individual photographs of all students, a school might focus its resources on providing group portraits. Schools would take pictures of entire grade levels and the clubs, organizations, and societies in which many students participated. To maximize the number of featured students, yearbook editors would occasionally assemble a montage of headshots on a single page with student names listed on an adjacent page.
Photographs of campus buildings and landscapes, classroom interiors, student lounges or activity spaces, and even the local city or notable geography were popular inclusions to aid the reader in visualizing the environment of a student's educational experience. Many of these photographs did not include students in them.
Yearbooks from the 1850s to 1910 often include:
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, students used long- and short-form writing to capture their experiences and memories of school. Students conveyed their thoughts and opinions through short narratives, testimonials, poems, rhymes, jokes, plays, created dialogues, satire or cartoons, and sketches.
Although yearbooks from this time have a more formal tone, students expressed their humor. They had fun with sections like "grinds," a compilation of student jokes and complaints, creating a "dictionary" or "alphabet" of student slang or witty rhymes for each entry, or a "class chart" which might list a student's favorite expression, best or worst subject, and other descriptive adjectives.
Information about individual students differs between schools, especially grade school and college levels, and depends on the year. Some books list only a student's name. Then to varying degrees, schools might also include date and place of birth, parent's names, hometown, address, name of a previous school, a quote, a short phrase about the student's character, a personal statement from the student, plans for post-graduation work or continued education, or a list of clubs, organizations, athletic teams, and student offices held while at school.
Seniors or upper classes received more coverage than lower classes with larger photographs, longer character descriptions or quotes, or lists of academic and extracurricular activities.
Some yearbooks only include information about the graduating students and no information about other seniors or lower classes.
Yearbooks included student-drawn graphics and cartoons on title pages or in the humor section as decorative embellishments and another way for students to capture their memories.
Many yearbooks often included a list of alums, stating their former fraternity or sorority affiliations and possibly their city of residence and personal or professional accomplishments. This section is helpful if the collection does not have a yearbook for a specific individual's graduation; the following years might include a section listing alums.
Most yearbooks from this period included advertisements at the end of the book. Readers were encouraged to patronize the businesses and services.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many schools admitted students twice a year. Students could begin in the fall or spring semester, and the school held graduation twice a year, winter and summer. This admission schedule means that yearbooks from this time might have multiple sections of seniors, possibly two sections of graduating seniors, and the senior students still taking classes.
Some schools only published yearbooks for graduating students.
In the catalog and finding aid, a one-half fraction after the year designates a mid- or half-year publication, such as "1916 ½."
Since individual schools set admission schedules, some schools published books with February and June graduates from the same calendar year, and others published with June and February graduates from consecutive calendar years. If the school and years you are looking for include a ½ fraction, keep search years flexible and include a year before or after to account for when a student or graduate might be listed.
It was not until around the 1970s that most Chicago grade and high schools solidified a primary enrollment date in the fall and held a single graduation at the beginning of summer. However, colleges and universities still admitted students on a rolling basis.