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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.

Three Court Calendars – Sullivan County, NY

Three Court Calendars of the Sullivan County Court.

July 1893 term, June 1899 term, and January 1904 term.

To us these are quite novel.  Although they were obviously very familiar to practicing attorneys a century and more ago, we have not encountered other specimens of similar material.

Sullivan County Court Calendar
Title page of a court calendar for Sullivan County, NY

Information includes the attorneys in the county were at that time (they’re listed),  the county officers  (likewise listed), and, interestingly, the grand jurors and the trial jurors for the term are listed too.  It specifies which cases would be heard, and approximately upon what date.

Among the litigants, we say some familiar names, including a railroad that was never completed – the Liberty and Jeffersonville Electric Railway – suggesting that without even operating it succeeded in running afoul of some people (the investors, perhaps?).  Regardless of its historical value, it’s fascinating to look at these relics of a judicial system that is now transformed into a far different animal.

More about this, as well as the opportunity to purchase a download of it, can be found on the Sullivan County page of our main website.

Early Sullivan County Timeline

 

Quinlan’s History of Sullivan County is considered the definitive history of Sullivan County, New York up until 1873.

James H. Quinlan, historian
James H. Quinlan, historian

While we were working through those early years in Quinlan’s History, we discovered that it was sometimes hard to tie all those events together in a sequential way.  To help us understand Sullivan County history better, we decided to use Quinlan to help develop a timeline of those years.  Suddenly much was made clear.

We’re glad to be able to offer this timeline free for your use.  Just click below to download it with our compliments.

Sullivan County Timeline to 1873

If you find that this timeline raises your curiosity and makes you want to read the whole book, there’s no reason not to do so.  There are several free scanned versions of Quinlan you can download, but our favorite is one scanned by Penn State University.  A link to a free version we like is on our main website on our Quinlan page, HERE.

After you download it, you might discover what we did:  that a 700 page book really needs an index.  No one can fault Quinlan for not providing one, given all that he did provide us with.  But we did decide to do something to make up for his omission.  We indexed Quinlan ourselves.  While you are on our Quinlan page, you will probably notice that we sell our index.  Frankly, it was a lot of work, and we think you will find that it is worth the price.

 

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!)

Child’s Gazetteers

Our experience has been that using available gazetteers to get a comprehensive overview of a county or a community is a great way to get started finding out about a new area.

Nearly always they have lists of inhabitants (usually heads of households) at a point in time about a year before the publication date of the gazetteer in question.  That’s almost enough to justify using these sources all by itself!

However, they — particularly those originally published by Hamilton Child in the 1870s and 1880s in New York State and Vermont — have a wealth of additional valuable information.  (We republish other gazetteers too, but let’s concentrate on this set for a moment.)

For example, often there is a county map.  There are capsule histories of each township in the county, which usually include population statistics.  Generally there’s short description of the educational system, some details about each community in the county, and a list of the houses of worship in the township with some statistics here as well.

We always find the advertisements — and the economics of gazetteer publishing dictated that there would be lots and lots of them — fascinating vignettes of rural life in that time period.

Gazetteers are also (justifiably) criticized as containing a fair number of pages of what can best be described as boilerplate, which appear in virtually all editions of that publisher’s gazetteers.  Examples include short descriptions of the states and territories, stamp duties, postal rates and regulations, popular nostrums of the time, and the like.  But this material (which actually is worth reading once, anyway) is not what you buy a gazetteer for:  you buy one to learn about a county and what was in it.

web3_large
A sample page from a gazetteer in New York State — heads of households and businesses

We’re happy to publish no less than three of Child’s gazetteers of various counties in New York State.  If one of these counties circa 1873 is of interest to you, by all means have a look!

—Sullivan County Gazetteer

—Lewis County Gazetteer

—Wayne County Gazetteer

Maybe, just maybe, one of these will be as useful to you as we have found it!

 

 

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