I get 99.9% of all of my yearbooks on ebay. If I am looking for a particular book I login, do a search, save the search (see below) and have ebay email me whenever something matching my search criteria comes up for auction.

Alternately, if I am just wanting a page or two out of a book I will try the local library where the school is/was.

Go to ebay.com  On the left side of the page you will see a list of categories.  Click on 'Collectibles'. On the page that opens, scroll down and click on the words 'Schools' under the 'Historical Memorabilia' section. It is possible to skip this step and do a search on all categories but often that will return a lot of results that have nothing to do with yearbooks.

Type your search words in the search box and check the 'check titles and descriptions' box.  If I am looking for a particular book I usually use the school's name, perhaps the town and or County where the school is/was located if I am unsure of the school's name. It all depends on which book I am looking for.

Once the search is performed you may or may not get any hits.  Either way (unless you find the exact book you are looking for) click on the link to the upper right that says "Add to favorite searches".  You will be asked to log in if you haven't already.  It should then prompt you to accept the name for the search.  Under the section 'Email Preferences' make sure the email me box is checked.  Change the 6months to 12 months and click the 'Save Search' button.

Now whenever an item matching this search criteria comes up for auction you will get an email.  Emails usually go out once a day, early in the morning.  If an item goes up for auction after the daily email goes out if won't show on your email till the next day. Once a year you will have to go into your searches and tell it to keep searching as there is no notification when the year runs out.  Ebay just quits emailing you for this search.

See my page on printing

Sorry, I don't know anyone in the books. See below for why I do this.

Many years ago I was bitten by the genealogy bug. I spent the first 40 years of my life not knowing anything on half of my family tree. I referred to it as the 'powerline' family tree or the dutch elm diseased family tree.

At 40 I found the other half of my family and began the long process of gathering information, pictures etc. Each picture was a treasure and a link to people I never thought I would know anything about. This has given me an appreciation for making connections. That and the fact that I know a little about web design added up to what you see here. It started after getting possession of one of my aunt's old yearbooks (1949 TAWANA). I decided to make it available for others on the web. That one led to two led to a pile on my desk I will probably never get through.

A couple of times I have been approaced to host other people's books. At first I though yeah why not. After a couple of hassles though I've decided that while I am more than willing to help you with advice or coding issues, you will have to do the work yourself. Its not that difficult and there are a lot of programs out there that can make it very easy. Below are some approaches I've taken in the past.

Offer Lookups
This requires a long term commitment from you. You post the fact that you have book XYZ either to your own site or to a genealogy site relating to where the school is located. Someone views your post and thinks that grandpa Jones is in your book. They drop you an email and you do the lookup. I started out doing it this way but found that it was more of a pain for me to go back and do the lookups for people not in the book so I started doing indexes.

Place an index of the book online.
This will require some web space but a rootsweb site will do the trick. I use Microsoft Access to do my index tables. I can type the name and page# into the table and sort by last name when I am finished. This can be exported to an html table and posted online. I tend to do cleanup of code before posting but it is possible to post the page just as Access spits it out. Once the index is posted anyone wanting to see a page from the book can email you and ask for the page to be scanned. As pages are scanned they are posted to the site linking the page to the index. Posting books this way alleviates the need to do lookups for people not in the book. On the down side you may be scanning pages from this book several years from now. This is fine until something happens to your scanner, to you, or to the book. You could end up with a lot of partially posted books on the net which will be a real pain for someone years from now looking for their mother's picture only to find out that it was one of the pages not scanned before you disappeared into the sunset. This last issue was what prompted me to start indexing and scanning the book in total before making the post.

Index and scan the book then post it online
This is how I do all of my books now. I am in the process of going back and finishing the scanning on the books that are indexed. I may get ultimately get fewer number of books online this way but what I do post will be complete and need no further input from me.

I suggest going with a free web host to get your pages online. Rootsweb offers web space for genealogical sites which a yearbook site would fall under. The nice thing about Rootsweb is that should I die tomorrow my pages will remain which would not happen if I rented server space and quit paying the bill. I've also donated a copy of some of the books I have scanned to GenWeb sites in the past. I went through all of this work to get this online, I don't want it gone in a couple of years should something happen to me. If you are interested in Rootsweb server space go to https://sites.rootsweb.com/~websites/register.html and request space.

Copyright laws have changed through the years. All of the books you see here will be pre 1972 and most are much older than that. The laws at the time stated that a book had to have a copyright notice to be under copyright. No notice meant no copyright. That is not true for books published today. IF a book was under copyright when it was published, it had to be renewed at a later date to still be under copyright today. I have only run across two yearbooks that were copyrighted at the time they were published. Neither was renewed and thus are free for me to copy and publish here. This is true for anyone else wanting to copy these same books. If you were to get an actual copy of the book you would be free to copy it and do what you wanted with it. I hold the copyright on the images that I have scanned though so please scan your own. I have given these images to the public for personal, noncommercial use only. If I learn that someone has taken these images and are charging for them I will not hesitate to pursue legal action.