Traditional Yearbooks
Yearbooks are a well-kept tradition that started many years ago. These books are used for many reasons and the most important reason is to preserve students memories while in school. Yearbooks are books that can make people smile the day they get them and many years after.
The use of yearbooks date back to the Middle Ages. Their yearbooks were used to record the legal decisions of that time. These decisions are the same decisions that were used to build legal systems across the world.
Unfortunately, there aren't many of these yearbooks around today to view but the concepts of yearbooks have had a lasting impression. Decades after the Middle Ages schools thought to use yearbooks to record the graduates of their schools, boosting their reputation for turning out successful people.
Year after year, yearbooks continued to evolve into different versions. The first version of a school yearbook was a thin publication. It was filled with sketches of the graduates and a little information about them such as their dates of attendance, name and time of attendance. It was a popular publication but not engaging.
As the trend caught on, students took over producing yearbooks. These yearbooks were filled with a lot more than the previous one. Students filled these books with student written literature, calendars and jokes along with the information about the students of the school. This was a version that was very entertaining for the students as well as showed who graduated from that school.
The direct ancestor to the modern yearbook was introduced with the introduction of the picture camera. These yearbooks were filled with actual pictures of the students that attended the schools, pictures of the events that took place during the year as well as other information that was approved to go into the yearbook.
Today's yearbooks are filled with a multitude of things. There are so many school activities that schools and students engage in and those things are captured in the pages of a yearbook. Pictures of students are still the most popular aspect of these books though. Production for yearbooks start almost immediately as the year begins and they are ready for students as the year comes to a close. This is a great way to close the year for graduating classes, a memory to take with them.
One of the biggest joys of having yearbooks is having friends and faculty sign those books. For some, those signatures and notes are all that are left of pivotal friendships from a person's childhood. Yearbooks are a tradition that will continue to be celebrated and participated in.
I'm a school principal with a passion for writing about online school yearbooks. Visit http://www.classmates.com/yearbooks to learn more.