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.
30 or 40 is still less than 50 but I guess someone who kept their annuals for 40 years is likely going to still have them at 50 also.
And you are correct, it is an individual proposition. And it is probably different in different parts of the country.
We have just been through a three year period in which we were looking for annuals for both my class and my sister's class--an incity high school in a defined geographical area where more than 50 years later, many of the alumni still live. Bigger classes than Mercer Island--we were probably 120-140 a class. As I recall, we never found a copy of mine; hers, there are a couple of copies, I don't remember whether the one I saw was hers or someone elses. A lot of members of both classes are dead.
You are correct--it is an individual issue but at least in the Seattle area, I suspect my rendition is a lot closer to the real world. At 50 years out, getting copies of the High School annual is not necessarily easy.
Further, nothing Fred has done really puts pressure on anyone to come up with a public copy of their book. Seeing a couple of former classmates sitting around looking at the book presenting the situation as being one in which they are looking at Stanley's book doesn't do any violence to the proposition--because it isn't easy to take a picture of the cover of the book with the internal evidentiary pictures showing--how would you do that? No one thought it was important.
Yes, Fred's position is reasonable because we have seen lots of fake documents; artificial evidence; photoshoped pictures etc. So it is fair to say about the Mercer Island book that they should prove it.
But I don't infer from the current lack of an available public copy that one doesn't exist.