Ancestry Magazine

While our ancestors may not have had all the educational advantages that we enjoy today, chances are they spent at least a few years in school when they were young. Some may have even attended college. If you haven’t yet looked at your ancestors’ school records, you might have a surprise in store for you.

Records are kept for elementary and secondary schools, public and private institutions, colleges, vocational, and specialty schools. You will find records for any number of schools—boarding, preparatory, reform, medical and dental, agricultural, and religious. There are also schools for the visually- or hearing-impaired, or otherwise physically challenged students, that may give useful medical history information on your family.

The most common early school records are school board minutes, but while these may not seem as personal as a record with your ancestor’s name on it, you may find such potentially valuable information as teachers’ names, references to other records, and local community issues.

Records may be stored at the original institution if it is still in use, or they may be kept elsewhere if the original building was torn down. Check your state archives and historical societies, which often have online catalogs that can be accessed through the Internet.

Yearbooks
Juliana Szucs, editor of the Ancestry Daily News, wrote to her grand father’s alma mater and received a copy of a page from his yearbook with his picture and a brief description of his interests and activities. She also received his report cards for four years. What a find!

Historical societies are excellent sources for high school and college yearbooks. One historical society, for example, has yearbooks for more than 100 junior high and high schools, colleges, and universities, dating back to 1907. You might also try the local public library, the school’s alumni office, and even eBay. You might even find a yearbook with a message written by a family member.

For more information on yearbooks, see the School category at Cyndi’s List. It has links to online sites with yearbook information from 1902 to 1936. Cyndi’s List also has links to a smattering of school records from different states and countries including Colorado, Kentucky, Maine, Nebraska, Texas, Ireland, the Netherlands, England, and Denmark.

Attendance and Grade Records
Imagine finding an old report card for your grandfather or an attendance register with his grades in “reading, writing, and arithmetic.” You may learn that he was gifted in math, but found writing difficult. His student records may indicate that he often didn’t show up for school at all or that it took him three years to finish the sixth grade.

Before you decide that he was a poor student, remember that children living in a rural area may not have attended school in the spring or fall during planting or harvesting season. Many left school early to go to work to help support the family. For many of our ancestors, a high school diploma was a rare and precious accomplishment.

School Census Records
School census records listed children eligible for public school attendance although not all children would be listed. The age of those included in the census was determined by the regulations reg arding school atten-dance. Each child up to the age of sixteen, eighteen, or twenty-one would be included along with his or her birth date, nationality of parents, and address. Some religious schools also took censuses of the potential students in their area to plan for future staffing and facility needs.

School censuses can be helpful when federal census records are missing, but remember that a census listing does not mean the child attended school regularly or even at all. Children residing in institutions and orphanages, and those already employed, were also listed.

A Teacher’s Life
Some teachers wrote and published accounts of their experiences, as did Della Lutes, who wrote Country Schoolma’am and David Stienecker, author of A Frontier Teacher. Libraries and special collections may also have teachers’ record books or diaries, which might describe a typical day’s events at school or mention students by name.

Many state archives and libraries may have compilations of personal narratives of teachers within a certain state, such as People and Rural Schools of Shelby County, by Helen Cox Tregillis, and Jay Mack Holbrook’s Virginia’s Colonial Schoolmasters.

These books may include maps, pictures of old schoolhouses, and portraits of teachers. When checking online sources at local and state historical societies, be sure to cross-check for name and place. A school record or diary may be catalogued by both the teacher’s and the school’s name.

Newspapers
The local newspaper, especially in rural areas, carried lists of star students or those with perfect attendance. Participation in contests, sports, debates, and other activities, would qualify a student for inclusion in the paper. Travel to a multi-school event for a competition might also warrant a news announcement.

Teachers, too, could appear i n the local paper. The beginning of the school year might introduce new teachers and offer the information that Miss Jones was the new teacher and was boarding at the Howard home. (This might also suggest how your ancestor Anna Jones met and married her husband, Oscar Howard.) Today’s newspapers may carry stories of school reunions, even for schools that no longer exist, which could provide the opportunity to speak with your grandmother’s surviving friends.

Begin Your Search
For contemporary local elementary and high school records, telephone the school and ask about their records. The records may still be on-site, or they may be at your state archives or other facility. The records for a religious school no longer in operation might be in an archive for that denomination.

Public school records may be found in a historical library or archive under the school district number, which may be a different number today since so many school districts have been consolidated. Archives may have maps and lists of school districts to aid you in your search, and some county tax records will list the school district number on them.

Many colleges and universities have their own archives, often located in the school library, and information on these archives and special collections might be available online. Archives may also have photograph collections that include old schoolhouses, special events, and classroom pictures. For example, the Colorado State Archives is home to a wide variety of school records, with student “promotions” to eighth grade from as early as 1918 and superintendent reports discussing teachers, students, and textbooks used. USGenWeb has a variety of records, and a Google search with the name of the school and location can be effective.

Alumni associations exist for all types and many levels of schools. A website may contain lists of alumni and a history of the school. Alumni offices may ha ve information about the location of records for that school and whether there are any indexes. There may also be an alumni newsletter that tells about graduates.

Genealogical periodicals are also an excellent source for school records, and they often publish lists of students who graduated from schools in the area. The Periodical Source Index (PERSI) has subject indexes to many school records and indexes found in thousands of genealogical and historical periodicals. PERSI will take you to the specific periodical, right down to the exact issue.

Schools, both private and public, are listed in city directories. A school from 1886, however, may no longer exist because that school has merged with another one. A county history may detail education in the county, and rural plat maps will give the location of schools.

Access
Some student records may be considered private for a certain number of years. The types of records found for one locality may not exist for another place, even within the same state. Sadly, there is always the possibility that the records no longer exist. As with all other records we use in our research, the records differ by time period and contain more information in more recent years. Additionally, records for religious, ethnic, and many higher-level schools are considered private and might be further restricted. In nearly all cases, proof of relationship and death of the individual whose records you are seeking will be required.

Before you contact a school or historical institution, learn all you can about your ancestor so you will have an idea of the schools he or she would have attended and the time frame. Most school records are not well-indexed, and if you write to a school and ask for information about your ancestor Samuel Jones who was a student there between the years 1885 and 1910, you may not get much assistance.

Wherever you are in your search for yo ur ancestors, sometimes it pays to go back to the beginning. With the help of current schools, online catalogs, county and school histories, you can learn more about your ancestor’s early life than you may have ever thought possible. You may also learn that not only did you inherit your name from Aunt Ingrid; you also inherited your love of history.

Paula Stuart Warren, CGRS, is a professional genealogist, consultant, writer, and lecturer. She has lectured all across the United States and is a course coordinator at the annual Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy. She is co-author of Your Guide to the Family History Library: How to Access the World’s Largest Genealogy Resource.