Google Sites/cloud computing

Google Sites is a form of cloud computing. It frees a person, business, or family from worrying about technical details like hard drives/memory/processors and shifts that concern to another party. Another advantage of using cloud computing is that it's not on a single computer's local hard drive so any number of users can access this site from any internet-connected device whenever they want to.

On the other hand, some features could be changed or even removed by Google without warning. If this occurs, we will attempt to adjust the site to continue providing the same features, but some could be nearly impossible to replace or duplicate. 

Census records 

Census records for rural areas before the early 1900s do not always include street names. The reason is rural locations originally didn't have established street addresses. People on rural farms had to get their mail at remote post offices until the US Postal Service began the Rural Free Delivery (RFD) service in the late 1800s for rural mail delivery. Even after RFD was established a given location only had a route number, not a specific address. So how do you determine where a rural family might've lived without a specific address? Historic maps as mentioned below are the key. With the names of the rural property owners on a map, you can look for their neighbors' names in the actual hand-written census to see if they match. Of course, it might help to know where they lived roughly so you can locate them in a smaller area of the right map for a given state/county. Also, expect many haphazardly misspelled names especially for foreign-born immigrants pre-WWI. If the family you are looking for was renting a house at the time, it may be difficult to locate them on a historical map. (see Homesteads and Census Records)

Yearbooks

A free website with scanned school yearbooks from 1890 to 1979 was discovered at MyHeritage.com. Yearbooks after about 1920 are interesting due to their photos particularly senior photos. The website's search engine will find a student by name, year, and school/location. However, searches are tricky because last names can be misspelled and initials are often used instead of the whole first name in yearbooks. It is also complicated because siblings or cousins may have nearly identical names, and OCR scanning errors and missing yearbook years hamper search results. Some schools seemingly skipped yearbooks during WWII 1941-45 likely due to war rationing and low student attendance. Students and some teachers instead of attending school, took jobs that wouldn't have been available to them before the war because they couldn't serve in the military.

The way to combat these issues is to have solid names, dates, and locations of the people you're looking for. These can come from obituaries, census records, newspaper pieces, family documents, FamilySearch, and FindAGrave. Once you match these facts you can be almost certain you have the right person. Missing one or two of them can lead to mistakenly identifying the wrong person. Even with the right facts the search engine may not find the person(s) you're looking for. Fortunately, MyHeritage.com lets you view entire yearbooks page by page. This allows you to manually search for photos that may be difficult to find any other way. All you have to do is know the year and high school you think the person attended.

While the above methods help, don't be too shocked if you still can't find the person you're looking for. In the United States, compulsory education laws for school attendance were enacted in all states by 1918. However, enforcement of these laws was often unsuccessful until the 1930s. Rural farm children usually attended school until 8th grade in proverbial one-room schoolhouses. So before 1930 families may have ducked sending their older children to high school claiming they were needed on the family farm causing undue hardships if forced to attend. Some students also may have skipped photos due to cost or absence.

Apart from missing yearbooks due to WWII, some rural school districts were so small they couldn't afford yearbooks or didn't have enough students. In Royalton, NY, the Gasport High School graduated its first seniors in 1922 and its last seniors in 1944. Starting in 1945 students attended the combined Roy-Hart school district instead and the Gasport HS building was eventually demolished in 1966. No Gasport HS yearbooks have been found. Several Kleinhans cousins attended and graduated from Gasport because it was closer to them than Lockport or Middleport. The 1945 Roy-Hart yearbook includes honor rolls listing  James and Theodore Kleinhans, Robert DeYoung, Lester and Roger Miller, Norman and Donald Schultz, Roy Van Buren, and John H Goodnick for being from the Royalton area and serving in WWII although not indicating which school they had graduated from. James and Theodore Kleinhans had indeed graduated from Gasport HS.