How to Create Your Online High School Yearbook

By Dan Hughes
 

First, get yourself a web site!  Don't do a freebie, because it will drive everyone nuts with ads.  You can get a domain name ( http://www.yourschool.com) for about $7 and a gig of ad-free space for about $18.  (These prices are annual fees).  Get my Web Manual if you are already confused:   http://danhughesbooks.com/books.htm

Do it like I did (http://bdhs65.com/yrbkbios/A.html), or like my school's class of '56 did (http://home.insightbb.com/~heber16/).

Now start a detective's notebook. You're gonna have a LOT of stuff to write down. Here we go:

Spend the $30 to join Classmates (http://classmates.com). This will let you email every one of your classmates listed on their site, and they probably have quite a few who you won't be able to find any other way to contact. Tell them what you're doing, ask them to write you back AT YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS rather than through Classmates.

Go through your senior yearbook and look up each male name in the current phone book of your high school's town (females have different last names now).

Call to verify they are the right person, get some fast info (what they do now, what they've done since high school, spouse's name, kids, military, etc), and then (very important) ask them who they are still in touch with from the class. You are networking!  You'll have a lot of fun conversations doing this.

This is fairly easy, because both your yearbook and the phone book are alphabetized so you won't have a lot of back-and-forth flipping of phone book pages.

With strange last names, call anybody in the phone book with the same last name and ask if they are related and if they can help you find the missing person. You can do this with female last names, too, because their male relatives will still have the same last name.

By the way, you'll turn up a person or two who hated high school and doesn't want anything to do with you or your project (I think I hit two of those). They may even get close to hysterical. Weird. But honor their request and put a note in the yearbook that they don't want to be bothered.

Do any other classes from your school have online yearbooks?  If so, check their class lists for the last names of kids from your class who you haven't been able to find.  You can find brothers and sisters (even cousins sometimes) of people in your class.

Go to your school's official site and see if they have class reps listed for other classes within ten years or so of your class (both ways - older and younger).  If so, call the other class reps and ask for lists of their alums, so you can again search for brothers and sisters.

Pull up an internet phone book and recheck the names you didn't find in your local book. I did most of my long-distance calling on weekends so my cellphone bill wouldn't be affected.

After you've done that, Google the names you couldn't find in the phone book. (Some are too difficult to find; names like "Bob Smith" you can forget - you'll get a million Google hits). You can narrow some of the hits by adding anything you can think of that might isolate one of your classmates. For example, for a classmate who played in a rock band, add "guitar" or whatever. Add their college if you know where they went.

Next, go through the free Social Security death list (http://ssdi.genealogy.rootsweb.com/) and you'll probably find some classmates who have died. Try to verify that they are yours (there are many multiple names out there). The list gives dates of birth and death and state where the social security card was issued, so you can narrow it somewhat with that info.

Call every classmate you turn up, tell them what you're doing, and ask them if they are in touch with other classmates.

Is someone in charge of keeping a reunion list? Are there previous reunion lists or booklets? They will have addresses and phone numbers more recent than 1966.

Recruit a few classmates (you trust) to do some of this for you if it is too much for you to handle by yourself.

Send out periodic newsletters to your class database with specific names you're trying to locate. Posting them here won't work because most of your classmates will never look at this board, even if they know it is here.

It took me just a couple of months to find maybe 150 of our 65'ers (out of about 500), then over the next few years I turned up another hundred or so.

Get their info on the class website so they have something to read there!

This is quite a job, but a very enjoyable one. I read all the Hardy Boys books when I was a kid, and all the Perry Mason books later, so I had a ball being a detective and tracking down lost classmates.

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