New Milford downloads

We’re happy to announce two New Milford downloads!

A few months ago we announced that we had discontinued our “New Milford: 230 Years” CD-ROM.

A 1907 panorama map of New Milford

Now, we’re happy to say that we’ve followed through on our commitment to bring you the important material from that CD in the form of downloadable files.  You benefit because (1) it’s less expensive for us to deliver material to you by downloads than by making and shipping CDs — so we pass the savings along to you, and (2) you get the material you want immediately (or as fast as the file can download) without waiting for us to pack and ship the CD and the Post Office to deliver it to you.

Without further ado, here are the two books that are once again available as downloads:

Two Centuries of New Milford:  1707 – 1907

The New Milford High School yearbook for 1937

Both of these include indexes we prepared especially for them, and both are in PDF format — readable on your computer, whether a PC or Mac.

While the CD-ROM cost $20 plus postage, these downloads are available for $5 for the Two Centuries book, and $4 for the 1937 yearbook.

Take a look at the New Milford page of our website for more information!

The New Milford seal as it appeared on the front of the original book

Or, have a look at our catalog!

Adams Center High School Annual – 1922

Adams Center, Jefferson County, NY

 

We’ve just published another high school yearbook — this one nearly a century old — so we thought we ought to comment on this particular one.  High school yearbooks capture moments in time – or at least the best of them do.  This one, soft cover and limited size included, give us a glimpse of this Jefferson County community at the beginning of the Roaring Twenties – an era which would change American culture in significant ways.  It also represents a time when there seemed to not yet be a consensus about exactly what belonged in a high school yearbook, as the contents of this number illustrates.

Adams Center High School 1922
Adams Center High School – Annual for 1922

First, the graduates that year numbered seven.  That’s not exactly a large graduating class.  So, absent was the customary bunch of pages of portraits and accomplishments.  A single photo suffices for the class.  There is a senior class history.  A senior class will.  A senior class prophecy and a class poem.  An address by the class president, followed by a response by a member of the junior class.  Then follows a series of essays:  “The United States Merchant Marine”  “The Grand Canyon of Arizona”  “A Drama”  (about Shakespeare’s Macbeth)  “Helen Hunt Jackson” (identified as one of the most famous women in the United States; unknown today, she seems to have been an advocate for Native Americans).

Remarks by the Principal at the presentation of diplomas are followed by an article advocating for a new high school.  Then comes a curious table called “School Census, 1921-1922 – Incomplete Returns” which we presume was humorous.  With prohibition in effect, next comes the obligatory article “Alcohol as a Menace”, followed by a light-hearted section called “Ifs” and a “Who’s Who”.  A photo of the baseball team is followed by a history of the school, which is in turn followed by reports on the various sports teams.

Unexpected contents

Then comes a real oddity: the constitution and by-laws of the Ontario Interscholastic Baseball League. (we are still scratching our collective heads over that one!).  Then some current poetry – again, presumably humorous if you knew the individuals mentioned.  Some more humor is punctuated by a photo of the girls’ basketball team.

Rather abruptly a photo of the Adams Center High School faculty appears, along with the list of the members of the board of education.  A boon here for family historians, next to come is a list of alumni by class, including their present city of residence.  Class years begin with 1899, and the compilation is acknowledged to be incomplete.  Then comes a list of the members of each class of the high school – including two post grads – and a list by class of those in the elementary school.  Ten pages of advertisements wrap up the book.

Yes, we do have it for sale as a download.  If you’re sold on this one, go right to it on our Jefferson County, NY page.

But we have  republished quite a number of yearbooks now, so if you would like to see them all listed in one place, you can go directly to our yearbook page.

 

Suffield History and Genealogy

Suffield history and genealogy took a step forward this week, as we re-published some documents that should be genuinely helpful.

Suffield Quarter Millennial
We’ve re-published Suffield: Quarter Millennial

Here are the four:

  1. Suffield Quarter Millennial — this book encompasses the history of Suffield, CT from its founding until the time of the celebration, is also the program for the celebration, and has tons of additional Suffield information in it.
  2. An annual report from Suffield’s Congregational Church.  Town (and church) history, lists of pastors, lists of members and also “absent members”
  3. A Sagitta yearbook from Suffield High School
  4. A package of miscellany, including an article from the first volume of the Connecticut Quarterly, a short excerpt from the Connecticut Guide, and a lot of photos.

You can find all this Suffield history and genealogy on our Suffield page on our main website.  If Suffield, CT is of interest to you, have a look today!

A Wartime Yearbook

We’ve just re-published the 1942 Libertas yearbook from Liberty High School in Liberty, Sullivan County, New York.

You can be excused if your immediate response is “What?  You’ve published another Liberty High School yearbook?  What’s your plan?  To re-publish all of them?”

To tell the truth, we wouldn’t mind re-publishing all of Liberty High’s historic yearbooks, but realism tells us that we could never possibly find copies of all of them to scan — which gets us around to why the 1942 Libertas is different and interesting.

A Wartime Yearbook

First of all, it is a wartime yearbook!  Published only months after Pearl Harbor, it is still the only example from Liberty High School that we have of this genre.  There are many things that this yearbook has in common with non-wartime yearbooks (it has all the usual contents, for example, including photos with names of grades seven through twelve, and abundant advertisements) but the moment you pick the original up you notice that it has a soft cover rather than the typical hardbound book cover.

a wartime yearbook
Front cover of the 1942 Libertas, the yearbook of Liberty High School — note the front cover is paper this year!

Later in the war, yearbooks began to reflect a nation actively gearing to to support the war efforts.  Later yearbooks included lists of students who had left high school to serve and, eventually, in memoriam pages for those who would not be returning home.

Nonetheless, this is indeed a wartime yearbook.  We think it’s worth a look.  You can do so, and, if you wish, purchase a download of it, on our Liberty, NY page.  CLICK HERE to go directly there.

 

Liberty High School Annual for 1919

The Liberty High School Annual for 1919 was the first-ever yearbook Liberty High School published.

1919 graduates
Some of the 1919 graduates from Liberty High School

About yearbooks

High school yearbooks are one form of history within which everyone is recorded when they graduate from high school. They, and their community, are frozen at a point in time that the yearbook captures and keeps. Haircuts, clothes, friends, teachers, the sense of humor of the era, the area businesses – they are all captured as they were, not as we choose to remember them or tell our children they were back in the good old days.

1919 versus today

The class of 1919 graduated before a period of major social change, as a cursory examination of the yearbook will demonstrate.  First off, the size of the class demonstrated the extent to which completion of a high school education was not a general expectation.  In a community that had not changed that much in size between 1919 and the later, post WWII yearbooks we republish, this graduating class is tiny.  Viewing the credentials of the faculty, it’s clear that the expectation that a high school teacher would have even a baccalaureate degree is a creature of the near-century that elapsed since this class graduated.

The function of the yearbook has also changed, quite clearly.  More recent yearbooks are almost entirely about the class graduating, and on the activities in which they were participants.  This issue turns the focus back to those who went to Liberty High School in previous years, even decades.  From our point of view today, capturing this much news about Liberty High School alumni dating back into the previous century (the first class with alumni reporting was the class of 1893) is a book for those searching for a larger population than a single year’s graduating class.

It’s available!

You’ll not be surprised that we’re offering the Liberty High School Annual for 1919 as a download.  Interested?  CLICK HERE to see it on our main website.

Rockville HS 25th Reunion

A few years ago we republished the high school yearbook of the class of 1932 from Rockville High School in Connecticut.

Now we are happy to offer a rare chance to be able to look back on these students a quarter century (and one great depression and two wars) later with their 25th reunion program.

Rockville HS reunion
Rockville High School Class of 1932 25th Reunion

More information about this program, now available as a download, is on the Tolland County page of our main website.

 

Owl Annual – 1917 – Hartford High School

This is one of the oldest high school yearbooks we’ve republished, and also one of the best.  High school yearbooks were different animals, back before the roaring 20s — indeed, high schools were!  Not everyone went to high school, just for openers.

Hartford, Connecticut, was also a different city.  Hartford was prosperous then.   This was a time when the city (and probably the state) were governed by the “Seven Bishops” — the Episcopal Bishop of Connecticut, and the CEOs of the six major insurance companies headquartered there that made Hartford the Insurance Capital of America.   
Hartford High School

This is a remarkable social document, and it is available now as a download now, for $5.00.

See it on our main website HERE.

High School Yearbooks…..#1

Virtually all local history material is of value to genealogists and historians.  Only in the past year or two, however, have the large genealogy companies (ancestry.com, for example) hit on the quantity and quality of genealogical and historical material contained in high school and college yearbooks and annuals.  And, they have begun to offer copies of some of these on their websites.

We’re happy to say that we were more than a decade ahead of the giants in recognizing the importance of yearbooks and in beginning their re-publication here at Between the Lakes Group.

Because of all the recent attention directed to yearbooks, we decided to list all of the yearbooks available from us, in the order of the year the yearbook was originally published, all on a single page.  There you’ll also find links to the location on our site you can find more information about them.  You can see that list on our Yearbooks page — just CLICK HERE to review it.

We’ll have a few posts on the subject of yearbooks — particularly high school yearbooks — and how you can use them.  For what?  Well, for starters, to fill out the lives of people you may be researching, to learn more about the communities you’re interested in, and even to establish an elusive connection to a family member.  Those posts will come as we write them in the next few days and weeks, so check back here for them.

The occasion that really prompted this page was our republication of the Port Jervis, NY High School yearbook for 1938, “Senior Memoirs”.  A pretty hefty yearbook (as they go) at 138 pages, with a few rarities in it (such as senior horoscopes to supplement the more standard Last Will and Testament section, and, hearkening back to yearbooks of two or three decades earlier, prize stories and poems), it is one of several Port Jervis High School yearbooks that we have republished.  It can be found on our Orange County, NY page.

(You’ll also see there the very first appearance of our snappy new “buy now” button!)

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