The box usually shows up at an awkward time. Your parents are downsizing and hand it over, or you find it while clearing a room for the nursery. Inside are four to eight heavy hardcovers, maybe more if your partner has a box too. If you're wondering what to do with parents' old yearbooks now that you are the parents, this guide gives you a way to decide in one afternoon.

The short version is that a family archive works best when it's small enough for someone to open. Twenty yearbooks in a garage are just storage. Two on a shelf, with names written down, are something your kids can use.

Should you keep your yearbooks? A quick decision table

In short: keep a book if it has things in it that exist nowhere else. Scan it if only a few pages matter. Pass it along if someone else would open it more than you will.

The printed pages of a yearbook are not rare, because every classmate got the same ones. What makes your copy one of a kind is the handwriting, the things tucked inside, and the fact that it's yours. Sort each book with that in mind.

That last row matters more than it looks, and it covers two different cases. A book that is only musty or warped, but dry, can be aired out in a dry room and then stored apart from your other paper.

A book with visible mold shouldn't go back in a box with your other keepsakes. Photograph it outdoors or by an open window, don't brush or wipe the mold off indoors, wash your hands afterward, and have someone else handle it if you have asthma or a mold allergy. If it's one you truly care about, a book conservator can advise. Otherwise, let it go once you have your photos.

Which yearbooks are worth keeping when you have a whole stack?

A simple cap helps: two books per parent. For most people that means senior year of high school plus one more. The second pick should be the book you'd be sorry to lose, which is often the one with the most writing inside the covers.

If you can't choose, try these tie-breakers:

• Pick the year your kids will ask about. A book where you played a sport, were in a play, or had a memorable haircut gets opened more than one where you only appear in a portrait.
• Pick the one with family in it. If a sibling, cousin or future spouse is in the same book, it covers two branches of the family at once.
• Pick the oldest in good condition. Younger kids like seeing a parent at their own age, so a grade-school book can beat a college one.
• Skip the college book if you're unsure. Many are large, rarely signed, and you may appear on a single page.

Two parents with two books each makes four yearbooks, which fit on one shelf. Everything else gets scanned and passed along.

It's also fine to keep none. Some people had a hard time in school and don't want those years on the shelf. One scanned portrait per school is enough to answer "what did you look like in fifth grade?" for the rest of your life.

How do you digitize a yearbook without wrecking it?

In short: scan the pages that are about you, not the whole book, and never force the spine flat.

Scanning all 200 pages is a long job with little payoff. A short list covers nearly everything a family will want later.

• ☐  Front cover and title page (they show the school, town and year)
• ☐  Your portrait page, the full page and not just your square
• ☐  Every club, team, band or candid page you appear on
• ☐  Pages showing siblings, cousins or close friends your kids know
• ☐  All signature pages and inside covers with handwriting
• ☐  Anything tucked inside: a program, a clipping, a note, a photo
• ☐  One or two "this is what life looked like" pages, such as ads, the cafeteria or the parking lot

Phone or flatbed scanner?

A phone is fine for most of this. Work next to a window in daylight with the flash off, and hold the phone parallel to the page so the edges stay square. A scanning app that straightens and crops will save you time.

Use a flatbed scanner for photos you might print or enlarge later. As a general rule, 300 dpi is plenty for reading on a screen and 600 dpi gives you room to reprint a small photo larger.

To scan a bound book without flattening it, lay one page on the glass and let the other half of the book hang off the edge of the scanner, so the book stays open at about 90 degrees. Support the hanging half with your hand, and don't press down on the spine or close the lid on it. If the book won't sit that way without strain, use the phone method instead.

Protect the spine while you work

Old glue cracks when a book is pressed open to 180 degrees. For phone photos, rest each cover on a rolled towel or a second book so it opens in a wide V. A little curve in the image is a fair trade for a binding that survives.

Some scanning services offer to cut off the spine and feed the loose pages through a machine. That's quick and gives clean scans, but the book is gone afterward. Only choose it for a book you already planned to let go, and ask the service which method they use before you mail anything.

Name and back up the files

Use a file name that makes sense to a stranger: year, school, your name, page. Something like 1999-lincoln-high-jamie-portrait-p84 works. Save a copy in two places, such as your computer and a cloud folder or external drive.

If you're already building a digital family folder, these files belong beside the other things you've saved. Our guide to saving texts and voicemails as a family keepsake uses the same naming approach.

Signature pages are full of other people's names and private jokes, and the photos are of people who never agreed to be posted. Sharing scans with family is one thing. Uploading a whole book publicly is another, so keep the full scans private.

Storing old yearbooks so they last

In short: store them cool, dry, dark and steady, which rules out the attic, basement and garage.

Paper and glue do badly with swings in heat and humidity. That's why a book stored in a garage comes out with a wavy cover and a musty smell. The Library of Congress preservation pages and the National Archives' family archives guidance give the same basic advice for books and papers: a stable, moderate environment and as little light as possible.

At home, that looks like this:

1. Choose an interior spot. A bedroom or hall closet shelf is ideal. Avoid outside walls, radiators, vents and sunny windows.
2. Empty the book first. Take out rubber bands, paper clips, sticky notes and pressed flowers. Newspaper clippings are acidic and will stain the pages they touch, so move them to a separate folder. Pressed flowers can go in their own envelope or folder too, labeled with the book they came from.
3. Shelve upright or stack flat. Stand books upright between others of similar size so they don't lean. Large or heavy books can lie flat in a stack of two or three. Don't store a book resting on its front edge, which pulls the pages out of the binding.
4. Box them if they're going out of sight. A box labeled acid-free and lignin-free, just big enough for the books, keeps out dust and light. Skip sealed plastic bags and bins in damp rooms, since they can trap moisture.
5. Leave repairs alone. Household tape yellows and damages paper. A loose page is better off slipped back into place than taped.
6. Check once a year. Open the box, flip a few pages and sniff. Catching dampness early is the whole point.

You can use the same box for other paper keepsakes of yours, like report cards, a graduation program or a team photo. If you're setting one up for your child at the same time, our checklist of what to put in a baby memory box and what to skip uses the same size-limit idea.

Or skip the box and put one on a shelf

A keepsake nobody sees isn't doing much. Consider keeping one yearbook on a living room bookshelf where your kids can reach it, and storing the other more carefully. Ink fades with long exposure to light, so keep the shelf copy closed and out of direct sun.

Expect a few fingerprints on the shelf copy, which is the price of a book that gets read. If one book holds the signatures you care most about, put that one in the box.

Where to pass along the yearbooks you don't keep

Yearbooks are useful to more people than you'd think. Try these in order, and always ask before dropping anything off.

• Siblings and cousins. If you overlapped at a school, your spare book may be the one they lost.
• Classmates. Reunion groups and class pages often have someone asking for a replacement after a flood, a fire or a move.
• The school or alumni office. Many schools keep a run of yearbooks and have gaps. A quick email with the year tells you if they need yours.
• The local library or historical society. Local history rooms collect yearbooks because family researchers use them to find names and faces. Genealogical societies do too.
• Recycling, as a last step. Rules for hardcover books vary by town. Often the cover has to come off before the pages can go in paper recycling, so check locally.

Before a book leaves the house, flip through it once more and check the back pocket and the space under the dust jacket. Notes and photos tend to hide there.

Add the story before you close the box

In short: ten minutes of writing now is what will make the book mean something to your kids later.

Your child will know your face in the portrait. They won't know who the friend in the next row is, why three people wrote the same nickname, or that the teacher on page 40 is the reason you chose your job. That context lives only in your head.

Write it on a separate sheet of plain, acid-free paper and slip it inside the front cover. Don't write on the pages, and skip sticky notes, which leave residue. Here is a note you can copy and fill in:

"This is my yearbook from ______ School in ______, the year I was in ______ grade. I'm on pages ______. The people who mattered most to me that year were ______, and you can find them on pages ______. If you only read one signature, read the one from ______ on the inside back cover. One thing about that year the book doesn't show: ______."

For a shorter version, a single line still helps:

"I kept this one because ______. Pages ______ are the ones to look at."

If you want to go a step further, the one-page story card in our guide to documenting the story behind a family heirloom works for a yearbook too.

Put the scans to use

The best use of a scanned portrait is a side-by-side. When your child starts first grade, pull up your first-grade photo and theirs. Kids love it, and it gives an only child someone to measure against. We suggest the same idea in our post on what to compare an only child's height to.

You can also print your portrait from each grade on a single sheet. A dozen small photos in a row tell the story faster than a dozen books.

What if the yearbooks belonged to your parents or grandparents?

Sometimes the box isn't yours at all. It came from a parent's house after a move or a loss, and the decision feels heavier because you can't ask what mattered.

The same sorting rules apply, with three changes:

• Ask while you can. If the owner is living, sit down with the book and a phone recorder for twenty minutes. Have them point at faces and talk. That recording is worth more than the book.
• Keep one per person. For a parent or grandparent, one yearbook is usually enough to hold the face, the handwriting and the era.
• Offer older books to a local collection first. The older a yearbook is, the fewer copies survive, and the more a school or historical society in that town is likely to want it.

Check with siblings before anything leaves the family. A quick group message with a photo of the covers and a date you plan to decide by avoids hard feelings later.

If you're handling this while grieving, there's no deadline. Put the books in a dry closet and come back when you're ready.

A one-afternoon plan

Most of this fits in one afternoon, in this order:

1. Lay out every yearbook and sort each one with the table above.
2. Choose up to two keepers per parent.
3. Scan the checklist pages from the rest, name the files and back them up.
4. Write the note and tuck it inside each keeper.
5. Shelve or box the keepers in an interior closet.
6. Send one message each to a sibling, the class group and the school about the books you're passing along.

The decision doesn't have to be all or nothing. Keep the books with handwriting in them, scan the pages with your face on them, and let the rest go to people who will open them. Then, the next time your child asks what you were like as a kid, you'll have a book to pull off the shelf and show them.

Frequently asked questions