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by Jessica Blackham
CLICK HERE TO VIEW ONLINE YEARBOOKS
NS Alumni Stephen Crosland hadn’t seen his good friend in decades. When they had the chance to reconnect, Crosland brought a yearbook along for them to look at.
“I brought the yearbook out of my car, and we were just looking through it,” Crosland said. “He was very excited because it was the very first time he had ever seen this yearbook. He asked me a question, ‘Hey do you know where I can get one of these?’ He had never gotten a yearbook from that year.”
This event sparked the idea for a major project, finding and scanning NS yearbooks to make digital copies available to the public.
As of right now, Crosland has digitized 154 yearbooks, including some from the current North Sanpete High School and middle school, as well as from the historic North Sanpete High School (Rams), Moroni High School and North Sanpete Junior High.
About a week after seeing his old friend, Crosland met up with another classmate who had lost all her old yearbooks when her basement flooded; and she wondered how she could retrieve new copies.
“After these two requests, I thought I’d just scan my yearbooks for them,” Crosland said. “I scanned both my junior high and high school yearbooks, then I uploaded them onto the cloud and shared the link with them.”
Crosland chose to also digitize his siblings’ yearbooks while he was already in the process of scanning his own.
“So it all kind of started there,” said Crosland. “After I did those other ones, I really wanted to try and find my mother’s yearbooks so I could scan them as well. This is when I contacted the school asking to check out the yearbooks they had.”
An arrangement was then made between NS and Crosland: that he was allowed to take and scan the yearbooks as long as he gave the school a digital copy.
With access to a commercial scanner at Snow College, Crosland started to digitize some of the yearbooks.
Unfortunately, Crosland could not find any yearbooks with his mother in them. He had learned that there weren’t any yearbooks from 1940-1947 due to the devastating effects of World War II and the Great Depression.
“This is where I gave myself a cutoff point,” Crosland said. “I told the school that I was just gonna do all the yearbooks I could until the 1980s because that’s the last year they had high school and a junior high separate.”
In his search of the 1980 copy, Crosland contacted retired NS faculty member, Anna Aagard to see if she had one from that year.
“I taught at the high school for 30 and a half years,” Aagard said. “I was one of the teachers who bought a copy of the yearbook for my students to sign. I have yearbooks from 1969 to 1971 and then I have the years 1979 to 2006. I also have yearbooks from my high school days.”
Knowing this, in March of 2021 Crosland decided to turn his hobby into a full-time project by choosing to scan all the high school and middle school yearbooks up to the latest issues.
“I spent 10 to 12 hours a day just scanning yearbooks,” Crosland said. “Depending on the condition, like if some had tons of signatures, they could take me up to 2 days to completely digitize them.”
Crosland was then put in touch with NS teacher and school counselor Ben Cox, who helped supply the yearbooks that Crosland was missing or had only parts of.
“Steve is a hero and he’s amazing for doing all of this incredible work,” Cox said. “He should be praised for all that he’s done and all the hard work he’s put in to help preserve the identity and memories of the school and the people.”
NS yearbook advisor, Lane Cook, also commended Crosland for his work and helped provide yearbooks for the project.
“I’m really glad that someone is putting all the yearbooks online, even the new ones,” Cook said. “There is something extra nostalgic about having a paper copy of the yearbook so I think people will still buy them, however; I love that the rest of the community will have online access to the latest yearbooks. I think the community will love seeing the traditions and it will make them feel more connected.”
Aagard often looks through all of her yearbooks and loves how they reconnected her to the school through all the pictures on the page. She cherishes the times she gets to show her family and friends and help them feel connected to the school as well.
“I’m grateful that Stephen Crosland is putting all the yearbooks online,” Aagard said. “Yearbooks are such an important part of history because they show not only your own history but they also show the school’s and the past year’s history. I love that everyone will get to look back at our valley’s history through yearbooks.”
All of the digitized copies are available to the public and can be found through a link on the NS Times website. (https://nstimes.org/)
“Those books are just priceless historic relics that really do mean something,” Cox said. “I think it’s important to share that so then anyone can go back and revisit the history. So it is important we scan all the yearbooks we can.”
While Crosland has already scanned 154 yearbooks, he’s still searching for a few missing puzzle pieces. He is still trying to find the old NS Rams copy of the 1928 yearbook, along with fully completed copies of 1940, 1946, 1948, and 1949 NSH editions.
If you have any information cornering these editions, please email Ben Cox at ben.cox@nsanpete.org.
