You mean you are even older than that? You went to high school before 1960?
I was kidding you to some degree. No you didn't say 1960.
What I was attempting to point out to you which I will now spell out in single syllable words is this--I assume when you tell me that you have all your annuals, that you graduated from high school sometime in the last fifteen or twenty years--maybe twenty-five. So it is not surprising that you have yours.
In my case, mine were all gone 17 years after I graduated because by then I had two homes; my parents had cleaned out their primary home; I have no clue where mine went or when I parted company with them but my high school period was less important to me then--it was ancient history.
And that is what happens to most people and to most copies of the annuals. For most people, the significant events and periods of their lives are after high school--sometimes quite a while after high school; the annuals cease to be relevant until you have been out for fifty years and have reached a point of reflection. By then, your high school years may seem more important but the documentary records are long gone.
So when Fred attacks on the theory that it is unreasonable to hear that most public copies of the annuals from Mercer Island in 1960 (51 years ago) are gone, I argue that it is not unreasonable at all--it what you would reasonably expect.
At some schools, there is some institutional memory department (the Library; the Administrative Office; etc.) that is responsible to maintain copies of the yearbooks but those books get loaned out (to the local newspaper) when a graduate becomes managing partner of one of the major downtown law firms twenty years after graduation etc. And don't get returned. So by the time you get to periods thirty or forty years after graduation, even in the slowest least accomplished classes, the annuals are all gone.
He has to be feeling the heat....drip drip drip drip...
Last 15 or 20 years? I wish. No, it was closer to twice that, sorry to say. But now that we’re talking about this, my mother had all of her high school yearbooks, too, and she graduated before 1940. I’ve moved 5 or 6 times since high school, but I hauled my yearbooks with me every time, as did my husband.
Different people place different value upon mementos like high school yearbooks. My guess is that it might also depend upon what type of school one attended and where the person grew up—that is, what part of the country, urban, rural, ethnic culture, etc.
One cannot extrapolate from one’s own life and apply it to everyone else. I offer my evidence to counter your claim that for most people the significant events of their lives happened after high school.
For many people, high school is (or was in the past) the end of their formal education. The end of hanging out daily with a large group of similarly aged people. Age cohort, if you know what I mean. An important influence. Many people look back fondly on those years and hold onto reminders like yearbooks.
This is similar to the topic of genealogy. Some people love it while others could not care less about their ancestry. But just because I like genealogy, I won’t say that most people do, too.
Fred and other researchers are perfectly right to wonder why, of SO MANY HUNDREDS of people who attended Mercer Island High School when Stanley Ann Dunham is SAID to have been there, not one DISINTERESTED party has come forward with a yearbook.
Certainly, there would be quite a bidding war for an authentic copy with that 1960 graduating class in it.
I can think of a reason why we don’t see even one of those probably close on to 500 copies coming out: FEAR. Fear of getting “involved” or of being gone after by rabid Obama supporters, or worse.
Here where I went to high school they have a Historical Museum that tells about the history of the town. They have most of the year books from way back. They don't let people check them out.
I don't know if Mercer Island has a historical museum but if they do that would be the place to look for the year books.