The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center continues to be busy adding yearbooks to their online collections. Recently, they’ve started adding old yearbooks for Peace College, formerly, Peace Institute – an all girls school that opened in 1872.
front panel from the 1910 Peace Institute yearbook, The Lotus
Available yearbooks online currently include 1902-1912. More may be added in the future so keep an eye out.
Senior students from these years are also included in the NC Yearbook Index (with the exception of 1905 due to a technical problem). To see the list, click here.
In reviewing these yearbooks, I was particularly struck by the 1909 yearbook where the yearbook editors added pictures of themselves when they were babies & toddlers – what a great find for potential descendants!
Yearbook photos are a great way to capture details of your ancestors. I’ve been going through a number of the North Carolina yearbooks that have been added to the Internet Archive and sometimes I am particularly struck by a photo.
This weekend, while going through the yearbooks for Meredith College , I noticed that there were three girls, all from Halifax County, by the name of Kitchin. I was struck by the photo of one in particular before I even looked at the name – that of Musette Kitchin. Then, in the next couple of volumes for the college I found two more Kitchin girls. I wondered who they were?
In the process of researching them to reconstruct the tree and see how they were related, I learned that Hesta & Pauline’s mother is related to one of my family’s slaveowners – Kemp Plummer Battle (former president of UNC-Chapel Hill). Their mother Kate Mills Kitchin is a great- granddaughter of Catherine Ann Battle Wesley who was a sister to Kemp’s father, William Horn Battle. These types of connections are interesting to come across.
Yearbooks can help add great detail to your family tree. I wonder if Pauline’s family knows about her garnering the superlative for “Most Poised” ? You’ll find these yearbooks linked from the Education page.
