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How to Use Yearbooks to Tell Your Life Story
- Devon Noel Lee
- May 18
- 7 min read
Updated: May 20
Have a stack of dusty yearbooks on your shelf? Don’t toss them. Use them. Yearbooks are surprisingly rich resources when you want to tell a more complete, more visual, and more emotionally engaging version of your life story. Whether you’re writing a memoir, building a scrapbook, or just collecting memories for your family, yearbooks can help you connect names with faces and memories with moments.
Let’s explore six creative ways to use yearbooks to enhance your personal history projects—and how to do it well.
6 Ways to Use Yearbooks to Document Your Life Story
Yearbook content from pictures to text can help you tell your life story better, no matter the format you choose. Here's how:
1. Setting the Scene
Use your yearbook’s candid photos and building shots to establish the environment where your stories unfolded. Include images of the front of your school, the classrooms you remember, or the cafeteria where your group always sat. These small visual details help you immerse readers in your high school experience.
2. Remembering Classmates
Even if you’ve forgotten names over the years, yearbooks bring them back. You can match faces to memories and write about the friends, crushes, rivals, or classmates who shaped your experience—whether you were close or just shared a hallway once.
3. Honoring Teachers and Staff
Teachers play a big role in our teenage years. Use the yearbook to find their portraits and write about the ones who influenced you—whether they were inspiring, strict, funny, or unforgettable in some other way.
4. Filling in the Gaps
You probably didn’t photograph everything. Thankfully, the yearbook staff did. Use their photos to fill in moments you didn’t capture yourself. Pep rallies, plays, team events, or group shots can jog your memory and add visual richness to your stories.
5. Enhancing Memories with Context
Even if you remember a moment well, the yearbook might reveal something more—like who else was there, what the atmosphere looked like, or how an event was framed by your school community. Use captions, spreads, and feature stories to deepen your own narrative.
6. Honoring Special Memories
Some people or moments deserve a little spotlight, even if you don’t have your own photo of them. Yearbooks help you pay tribute to those standout people or memories that still make you smile—or tear up—years later.
To see more examples of topic ideas, watch the full demonstration.
his video focuses on the 6 ways you can use yearbooks to tell your story. However, it doesn't go into detail about tips to use yearbooks and the questions about copyright and fair use. Read on for that information.
Tips for Using Yearbooks Effectively
From scanning to selecting the right content, a few practical strategies will help you get the most out of your yearbooks:
Scan in High Resolution
Always scan your images at 600 dpi. This ensures they’re high enough quality for your final projects and can be printed or zoomed in without losing detail.
Clean and Enhance Images When Needed
Sometimes scanned pages introduce dust, scratches, or other flaws. A gentle blur or light editing can help smooth things out—just don’t go overboard. I usually skip colorizing since I prefer keeping things true to life.
Scan More Than You Think You Need
While you don’t need to digitize the whole book, you need to scan you're whole life. Here are things you'll want to scan (or download from an online yearbook):
Your self - your roster photo, any group photos you’re in, your ad pages, etc. Photograph yourself.
The people you remember in the school roster
The group photos from the activities you were in
The School administrators that you interacted with
Your teachers whose classes you loved and hated
Club sponsors
The candid shots of people and activities that generate fond memories
Buildings or classrooms that create strong emotions (both positive and negative)
Journaling blocks
Text about events
win/loss records
Year in review recap
Fight songs
Memorials
Anything else in the yearbook that would help tell your story.
BENEFITS OF USING YEARBOOKS IN FAMILY HISTORY STORIES
While my examples are using yearbooks in scrapbooks, you can enhance the visual appeal of any family history project (check out the post Creative Alternatives to Publishing a Family History Book for more ideas). So, why would you go through the trouble? Let me share three benefits:
Enhanced Storytelling
Using yearbook photos helps you better connect names with faces, improving the storytelling aspect of my scrapbook. Instead of flipping through thousands of pages to find relevant memories, you can condense key moments into one book, with photos and text that truly capture the essence of your (or your ancestor’s) high school years.
Space Efficiency
The final projects will be significantly smaller than the original yearbooks. In fact, I’ve replaced two yearbooks with a single scrapbook, saving a lot of shelf space. On top of that, I’ve scanned and digitized memory books and artifacts, eliminating the need to keep physical copies of things I no longer need. Since we’ll be downsizing in a few years, I have preserved my family history without sacrificing memories.
Option to Donate Yearbooks
Once you’ve digitized segments of your yearbooks, you can donate them. That way, they should be online if you ever need them again! A friend of mine is donating his yearbook to Classmates.com. You can also donate your yearbook to Ancestry and MyHeritage. I know the Internet Archive accepts digital copies of yearbooks, so that’s an option, but you have to do the digitizing. For those who need to downsize but don’t want to loose their memories, this is a terrific option.
ANY COPYRIGHT ISSUES WITH YEARBOOKS?
You may be wondering about copyright violations when using yearbook photos in your scrapbook projects. Let’s break it down.
Are yearbooks public record?
If the yearbooks are produced by a government school in the U.S., they're often considered public records, meaning they can be accessed and used within certain legal guidelines. However, the key here is how you’re using the yearbook photos.
Fair Use in Action
I believe my use of yearbook content falls under "fair use" for several reasons. First, I’m only using a tiny fraction of the yearbook—both text blocks and photos—compared to the overall content of the book. In my scrapbook, these yearbook pieces contribute to a larger story, where the majority of the material is original. It’s like if you cut out a few pages from a book to help tell your own story, rather than republishing the whole thing. That’s essentially what I’m doing.
Transformation of the Final Project
Although I’m not altering the yearbook photos themselves (because I want to preserve the identity of my classmates), I am transforming the format and context in which the photos appear. If I ever run into concerns, I make sure to cite the source of the yearbook content, which is standard practice.
Disclaimer
I’m not offering legal advice here, just explaining how I believe my use of yearbooks in scrapbooking fits within fair use guidelines. Always consult with a legal professional if you’re unsure about your own situation.
How You Share Your Yearbook Enhanced Family History Creations Matter
And here’s the biggest point: my scrapbooks are for personal use. They're not for sale. I’m not posting full Personal Use vs. Public Distribution
A key point to remember is that my scrapbooks are strictly for personal use and enjoyment. They’re not for sale or public distribution, which is one of the main reasons I feel comfortable using excerpts from my yearbooks. While this certainly strengthens my argument for fair use, it’s not a guarantee of complete protection. The fact that my work isn't intended for public consumption makes it more likely to fall under fair use, but it’s not a free pass to use anything without consideration.
If you're creating something similar for your personal collection and not planning to share it online or sell it, you're in a much safer spot legally.
A Word of Caution About Public Sharing
Now, here's where things can get tricky: if you want to share your project online or post it to social media, especially if it includes photos or information about living people, there are more things to consider. Once you put content out in the public domain, it's no longer just for personal use, and that raises potential copyright and privacy issues. If you’re sharing yearbook photos of living people, you need to be extra cautious about their privacy rights, especially if their images were used in a way they didn't agree to, like having their face publicly visible in a photo you’re sharing.
In these cases, I strongly advise getting consent from the individuals involved. Not only is this respectful, but it also helps you avoid legal complications. If you're considering using these images in a public forum, it’s also worth remembering that some yearbooks have restrictions on the usage of photos or content—check those out before uploading anything.
Finally, keep in mind that just because something is in a yearbook doesn't mean it’s public domain. Many yearbooks, especially those produced by schools, are copyrighted, and the right to use those materials for anything beyond personal enjoyment could require permission from the copyright holder. So, before you share your project publicly, think twice about your audience and how you’re using the material.
HOW WILL YOU USE YOUR SCRAPBOOKS TO TELL YOUR STORY?
How have you used yearbooks in your storytelling? Do you still have yours on a shelf? Are you inspired to scan them now and do something more meaningful? Drop a comment and let me know.
And if you’d like help getting started, grab the free handout below: it walks you through how to turn your yearbooks into a memory-keeping project you’ll actually enjoy flipping through.
Thanks for watching—and remember: if family history isn’t fun, you’re doing it wrong.
By using these actionable tips and incorporating yearbook photos and text, you’ll have a richer, more complete scrapbook that tells the full story of your high school years. Not only does this help preserve memories, but it also allows you to document the context and sentiments that go beyond what a single photograph can capture.
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