This indexed collection of school and university yearbooks from across Canada. is now available on Ancestry. Most individual entries have a photo and short write-up. You may also find people in a group photo of a team or class with everyone looking their best (mostly).
Provinces in the database, with number of entries, are: BC (73,568); Alberta (106,195); Saskatchewan (32,011); Manitoba (11,713); Ontario (941,128); Quebec (182,004); New Brunswick (2,816); Nova Scotia (5,706).
For Ontario universities the University of Western Ontario collection has 29 yearbooks between 1928 and 1988, the University of Toronto 19 between 1913 and 1959, Queen's University nine between 1932 and 1986. A few other universities have smaller collections.
Elsewhere there are 11 yearbooks for the University of Alberta, nine for the University of Saskatchewan. Alas only six for McGill University between 1925 and 1952.
For schools the largest collection I found is for Bishop's College School in Lennoxville, Quebec with nearly 80 yearbooks.
The index was compiled using OCR technology. Despite technology improvements it's easy to find nonsense entries like Moore Extras, there are 33 entries for that last name, and Fairy Gold. Such entries are easy to spot and ignore, and can bring a smile to your face!
McGill University Library has digitized their collection of McGill Yearbooks. They are available online at http://yearbooks.mcgill.ca/ and are indexed. The collection includes McGill yearbooks from 1898 to 2000 and Macdonald College yearbooks from 1931 to 2000.
ReplyDeleteElizabeth
An inspection of the only yearbook from my high school (dated 1969) yielded an index of staff members all born in 1949. The list also included Earl Haig and other well known people that schools have been named after. Obviously Ancestry had put their automatic transcribing software to work on these yearbooks. Remember, these bits of infomation will next show up in their huge database for innocent newbie family historians to pick up and treat as the gospel truth.
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