Fascinating details and glimpses into the lives of real people are available in old school records. Grade school, high school, and college records can be great information sources that most of us forget to investigate. Even though finding school records may take a little bit of detective work, many records can be found in the original schools, or in the archives of institutions that created the records. In some cases, records of long-closed schools have survived in local libraries, historical societies, genealogical societies, archives, and in other local and private collections. From school histories and class lists to the more personal yearbooks and old report cards, school records can help us understand our ancestors and the times in which they lived.

When my grandfather became ill, my mother was two and she was sent to live with cousins out of state. She never got the chance to get to know him and we were anxious to find out as much as we could about him. Before starting any research, all my mother and I had to go on were some vital statistics, some photographs, and some nice stories. Writing to his alma mater yielded something wonderful. Fordham University sent us a copy of a page from his yearbook! It contained a portrait of him that we had never seen. Better still, the brief description below it revealed a side of him that was previously unknown. "Joey," as he was known by his friends, went to Brooklyn Prep before moving on to Fordham, played interclass football and was involved in several other activities. The results of that investigation encouraged us to write for more. In our next try, we wrote to the school and got a transfer of his class records, which were essentially report cards for his four years there. Because of privacy issues, we had to prove that he was a relative and that he was deceased. We were lucky again and to our great joy we received the requested papers. What was especially interesting was that although he got his degree in law, his highest marks were in history. It made us wonder if we had inherited our special interest in history from him.

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