More Than Making the Grade: Using School Records for Genealogical Research
While energetic youth rarely look forward to the beginning of school in the late summer, genealogists should still take note: due to the types of records and publications schools generate and the importance of schools in communities, school records are a valuable resource. Among the more commonly used school records are attendance rolls and grade registers. While some people may not initially think to look to these documents for historical and family information, a closer look often reveals some interesting pieces of data.
Taking Notes
Many teachers, famous for their razor-sharp precision and their enormous attention to detail, used rolls and registers for recording more refined data than the preprinted column headings actually called for. For example, the 1919 grade registers for Lincoln School in Allen County, Indiana, serve both as a record of achievement and a record of attendance.
Not only are days present and days absent recorded along with subject area grades, but the reasons for the absences are also noted. Of particular significance are the individuals noted as having “moved away” or “moved to city.” This type of data can help explain why a family doesn’t appear on a census as expected, as well as assist in more precisely indicating when a particular family may have moved in or moved out of a community. Fannie Pratt, a teacher at the Washington township school of Wallen in Allen County, Indiana, did an even more thorough job in documenting why her pupils were not in class on a particular day. In addition to noting if a particular child stayed home because of the flu, the mumps, chicken po x, or exposure to diphtheria, she also notes if the child stayed home to take care of a sick parent or grandparent. Other reasons recorded for absences include “attended a wedding,” “death in family,” “stayed home to help butcher,” “death of grandmother,” “moved to LaOtto,” “attending Catholic school,” “shoe mended,” “kicked by a horse,” and “father seriously ill.” Careful analysis of such a school register may provide valuable clues about when a family moved to another farm, suffered a death in the family, or married off a son or daughter.An additional feature of school documents is the “register of visitors” in the back of many grade and attendance books. Parents, grandparents, school administrators, and even local officials who visited the classroom can be found with notations, such as where they resided.Well-Rounded Education
Skilled researchers often use one set of records to provide clues to refine another set of records. Attendance and grade registers can be just such a refining set of documents. Acquiring and searching through numerous years of un-indexed newspapers for news about a family—a marriage announcement, an obituary, or simply a visit from an out-of-town relative—can be a daunting task. Using school records to assist in identifying a more exact time period for an event can make the search more manageable. For example, if you know that a funeral took place between 5 March and 30 March 1923, and that three children of the same family attended, you can check school records for the dates the children were absent. That information can focus your search for the death annou ncement to a more specific range of dates.Aside from grade and attendance registers, there are a number of other original records that relate to schools and school activities. Private and religious schools, as well as some public schools, often kept detailed logs of teachers and parents. The 1847 through 1870 Sabbath School records of the Putnam Presbyterian Church in Zanesville, Ohio, provide detailed student rosters, lists of teachers with their salaries, superintendent reports, particulars of medical challenges facing the school population, and building and construction initiatives. Even newspaper clippings and copies of programs are among the logs’ pages.Records of the legal and business aspects of schools can also be quite useful. Records of the Board of Education for Cabell County, West Virginia, for the years immediately following the Civil War provide the researcher with the names of parents of school-aged children, their residence, and the names and ages of their children. Physical descriptions of the districts are provided with the names of the commissioners. Meeting minutes provide information on issues facing the schools as well as itemized payments made to area individuals for goods and services.
Over the years, local and state jurisdictions enacted laws that required enumerations to be taken to determine how much of the area’s financial resources and tax revenues needed to be designated for schools and educational purposes. As might be expected with any type of census record, these “school censuses” afford great detail to complement other census schedules and fill in gaps when federal and state population schedules do not exist. Typically these censuses give the names of parents and children, residences, ages and/or dates of birth of the children, and the census date. Some also record race and the sex of the children.
Fieldtrips
The first, best place to begin a search for school records is at the local level—at the school itself. However, as is often the case for genealogists, the school may no longer exist. In these situations, check the holdings of local historical societies and even the public library. Public libraries also serve as repositories of local organizational and institutional records. Records can be found in special collections, reference collections, and vertical files. Genealogists should also look for these records to be abstracted, transcribed, and indexed in local genealogy and historical society periodicals held by libraries—the next best thing to looking at the actual document.If you’re not certain of the periodical publication in which a school record abstract or index might appear, the PERiodical Source Index or PERSI is an excellent resource to consult. This online database is a comprehensive index to published works in genealogy and local history periodical literature. And there is a separate designation specifically for “school records.” A search for “school records” for Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, for example, produces forty-six references, including a Mount Joy school census and the Locust Grove Mennonite School data.In addition to these official school documents, libraries may also have scrapbooks of newspaper clippings about school activities, letters from former teachers and students, and even published diaries.
A Very Good Year
In addition to original s chool records, another extremely valuable group of records are the publications of those educational institutions. School directories and yearbooks are interesting and genealogically valuable finds. For example, in the seventy-page first edition of The Saw-Briar, the publication of the Annville Institute in eastern Kentucky, all of the resident halls (including hand-drawn sketches of the buildings and the names of the deans or matrons) are listed. Actual photographs are glued into lined frames to highlight the faculty and the various classes. The faculty roster includes the home towns of the teachers, their academic careers and teaching careers, and the various subjects they teach at Annville. The yearbook editors attribute positive characteristics to each instructor’s initials (Miss Emily E. Heusinkveld was said to be Entertaining, Earnest, and Helpful).The class rosters provide personal information about the students like residences, nicknames, and a history of classes taken. Other information includes class histories, class officers, a recounting of school plays, and notes of athletic conquests.The yearbooks and directories of alumni associations and reunion organizations can be another good source. Alumni organization publications can provide amazing quantities of data—early volumes typically contain more personal and genealogical information while the later volumes tend to be more like telephone books, listing current addresses, years of graduation, and degrees awarded.
The Harvard Class of 1917—Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Report contains more than one thousand pages. Addresses, nativity data, where the student went to school before Harvard, degrees bestowed by Harvard, marital status, children, other family members who attended Harvard, occupation, military service, and offices held in organizations are included for each student. Many of the sketches even contain information from autobiographical narratives.
As an example, Harvard alumni William Ashford’s narrative is nine paragraphs long and contains information from the days immediately after his graduation to the time of the twenty-fifth anniversary. We learn a lot about Mr. Ashford’s family history, a significant amount about him as a person, and we also gain a touch of his personality and wit. “I am unmarried,” he writes, “a fact that bothers my friends much more than it does me. I console myself by rationalizing my misfortune into the belief that teachers, like priests and artists, should be free to devote themselves entirely to their learning and their students.”
The Franciscan Alumni Association irregularly publishes both a newsletter and a membership directory that provides remarkable details about individuals who were part of the St. John the Baptist Province’s formation program and who attended St. Francis Seminary in Mt. Healthy, Ohio. Class rosters are frequently published with current cities of residence. Old photographs of seminary and province activities are reprinted as are contemporary pictures from recent reunions. Numerous narratives of current activities of alumni are also included. Students and faculty alike are given significant attention in this very small organization’s publications. And you never know whose seldom-seen photographs might show up—in St. Francis’s publication, it’s Tom Cruise.
Faculty directories are yet another class of school directories. The majority of these were published since the 1930s. Earlier editions tend to arrange schools by township, listing the principal and teachers with their associated grades and residences, as well as enumerating bus drivers. They also may contain data about other entities in the area that interacted with the schools or housed and cared for students taught in the schools, as in the 1940–1941 Directory—Allen Count y (IN) Schools, in which the nurses with the county and Red Cross Nursing Services are also listed.
School boards, city and township trustees, and school corporations may have also published annual reports. While these may rank among the driest reading a person can endure, most provide significant details about the schools in the particular community, and a number supply census-like data on teachers, children, and contractors.
Most Likely to Succeed
Any and every educational institution should be explored for school publications to complement actual school records that may exist. To locate these published materials, it’s best to employ a strategy similar to locating school records. The holdings of all the local public libraries should be checked. Some counties will even have a single combined library system that may cover a number of school districts, and hence one special collection where area yearbooks, alumni directories, and newsletters are housed.You will also want to check the holdings of state libraries. Historically, state libraries have endeavored to have very robust collections of directories. The Library of Congress has a Web page with links to nation’s state library websites where online catalogs and finding aids can be searched and, in many instances, links can be found to the public libraries within the particular state.A number of libraries also have access to a bibliographic database called WorldCat, a world-wide catalog available only to libraries and other institutions. Searching for school records and publications in WorldCat allows you to quickly survey the holdings of many thousands of libraries a nd other organizations that are members of the Online Computer Library Center. Use the name of the school or a geographic area of interest—a city or a county—followed by a subject term such as “schools,” “school census,” “schools—records,” or “correspondence.”School records and publications can provide both interesting and valuable information found in few other records. The fact that they are so plentiful and increasingly available through both print and digital publications should entice even the most casual researcher to take a look. These records can refine your knowledge about a family in a particular area while bringing ancestors to life through their writings, grades, photos, listings in an alumni directory, and the information others recorded about them. Among large classes of record groups, school records and publications definitely get an “A+.”
Curt B. Witcher, MLS, FUGA, is the Historical Genealogy Department Manager at the Allen County Public Library and a former president of both the Federation of Genealogical Societies and the National Genealogical Society.
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