It’s back to school time again, as the stores are reminding us. For genealogists like ourselves, this is as good a time as any to fill in as much as we can about our regional ancestors’ educations.
I’ve addressed this aspect of genealogy before, but this time around let’s look at some additional ideas and resources.
First, though, let’s do a little historic overview.
Luzerne County in past times, typical of Pennsylvania counties, had a school system based on each individual community maintaining its own schools or partnering with neighbors. Some towns opened schools as early as the 1700s. With an eventual 76 municipalities in the county, that meant a lot of schools – elementaries in particular – before the mergers began in the 1960s.
Time to get started! If you’ve compiled basic information on your ancestor who was not educated abroad, you probably know what town they lived in. Obituaries, city directories and the U.S. Census are good for this kind of information.
To find what schools existed, read up on the town(s) where your ancestor lived. Where do you get that data? The Phillips notebooks at the Luzerne County Historical Society’s Bishop Memorial Library has a section on each of the various towns in the county, with a list of the town’s schools.
If a town ever published an historical booklet for its centennial or sesquicentennial, there’s a good chance that booklet will be in the society’s library as well – possibly with information on historic schools.
If your ancestor graduated from their town’s high school, you’ll find graduation stories and lists in backfiles of local newspapers published around the end of the school year. Again, the most complete collection is at the Bishop Memorial Library.
Here is a key point – especially if the ancestor lived in a smaller town or a rural area.
In this case, the list might not be in an article with a headline but in what I call a “town column.” That now-vanished method of reporting news consisted of the name of a smaller town or rural area over a column or two of type, with events like graduations below.
What if the ancestor’s name does not turn up in the expected years of graduation?
Don’t worry. Near-automatic graduation from high school is a relatively modern phenomenon. An obituary that says “attended” or “was educated in” rather than “graduated from” is probably telling you that the person left school early, most likely for work.
Graduated or not, an ancestor’s name might also turn up in one of those town columns for an activity or sport in a high school or elementary school context. At least you will know that the ancestor was educated there.
High school yearbooks are good sources of information, and not just for graduating seniors. Other classes get mentioned and photographed, and so do club and sports team members. But many schools did not have them until after 1920. Public libraries have some, but their holdings vary. That means a search of library holdings.
The best yearbook collection is at the Northeast Pennsylvania Genealogical Society, in Wilkes-Barre.
Like the Bishop Library, it is membership-based. A list of their holdings is available online.
It is probably easier to find college data on an ancestor. In the 1800s and early 1900s, our area didn’t have any colleges, but graduations of local people from out-of-area schools were often reported as news, sometimes in those town columns mentioned above.
A lot of our area’s college yearbooks are at the Genealogical Society Library.
Tom Mooney is a Times Leader history and genealogy writer. Reach him at [email protected] .
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