Waite’s yearbooks The Purple and Gold (1915-1974) and The Warrior (1975-2020) Join TLCPL’s Online Yearbook Collection

Posted on June 25, 2021

by Gayle H

The Morrison R. Waite High School Yearbook scanning project is now complete! Of the 103 yearbooks that the Local History and Genealogy Department (LH&G) staff processed, 101 are available for viewing online at the host site of our growing digital collection, Ohio Memory. Slightly less than that, 87 copies, are available in LH&G for customers to view.

We owe our gratitude to Waite High School teacher Mr. Joe Boyle, who loaned us copies from the school’s collection to fill in most of our missing editions and even delivered them to us for this project. We would love for donations to our physical collections, or to have materials loaned so that we might scan them, of the following years that still constitute gaps in the collection: 2012, 2013, 2019 and at its publication, 2021. Our in-house collection is made up entirely of donated copies. Please remember us when you come across old yearbooks, as they are a treasure to historians and genealogists alike.

Two of the latest installments, 2018 and 2020, won’t be uploaded to our online site in compliance with legal restrictions due to the age of the students. They will be added in 2022 (2018) and 2024 (2020).

Currently, our Waite online collection consists of 20,092 images and TLCPL’s Digitization Services Supervisor, John Dewees, estimates the project took about 600 hours of staff work. This process includes scanning the books (an average of 30 minutes a book), editing the images (which averages 1 to 2 minutes per image), quality control and lastly, uploading.

In addition, we are fortunate that a history of Waite High School, Morrison R. Waite High School A Celebration of 100 Years, published in 2014 in honor of the institution’s centennial celebration, is also available in digital form through Ohio Memory and the Internet Archive. The authors, Bob Clark and Larry Michaels, are both Waite High School alumni. Waite High School has long been known for its close community ties, altruistic outreach, high recurrence of former students returning to teach at the school, and dedication to honoring its veterans in a yearly ceremony that spans 106 years, including a virtual ceremony during the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you’d like to know what yearbooks we currently have and which we are still in need of, please feel free to call LH&G at 419.259.5233.  If you’d like to see the whole picture of both in-house and online resources yourself, a recent addition listing our high school yearbook collections is now available online at the TLCPL website. Links to the in-house and scanned copies are provided here.

Yearbooks housed in LH&G

Yearbooks available online

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