Several years ago, while attending the Sacramento Archive Crawl, I stopped at a table hosted by archivists from Sacramento City College, the college my father attended when he first immigrated to the United States. After learning more from the archivist, I was excited to hear that the college had school yearbooks. I made plans to go and investigate further.
In January 1958, my father, Omar AbdulFattah Mohammed Awad immigrated to the U.S. from Palestine to attend what was then Sacramento Junior College. According to his I-94 and other immigration records, he arrived in New York on January 14, 1958, after sailing on the Cleopatra, a ship that departed from Beirut. (The story of my discovery of this information through his immigration file is one I’ll save for another post.) He then flew across country to arrive in time for placement exams and the start of the Spring semester.
Among my grandfather’s papers, I once found a receipt for registered mail sent from Bethlehem to the college—a small but revealing link between my father’s two homes, and a keepsake I now hold dear. Still, I hoped to find something more—another record of his time there.
Despite my excitement that day at the Archive Crawl, I postponed visiting the archive itself due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But recently, thanks to my work with the National Society for Arab & Arab American Genealogy (NSAB), I was reminded of my intention to look into this possible chronicle of my father’s college days. Working on NSAB’s recently published blog about using yearbooks and class photos in family history research, I renewed my curiosity.
I discovered that Sacramento City College had since digitized not only its yearbooks, but also its student newspapers, and made them freely available online. Knowing how limited my father’s means were at the time, I doubted he’d ever purchased a yearbook. Still, I looked.
And I found him.
There, in The Pioneer yearbook from 1961, was a photograph of my father – a meaningful record of what brought him to the U.S. in the first place.
After transferring to Sacramento State College (now California State University, Sacramento or, more informally, Sac State) later that year, my father continued his studies. Although Sac State’s yearbooks are also digitized on Internet Archive, I couldn’t find him in later volumes. Still, this one image, from a school he attended as a newly arrived immigrant, felt like a precious gift I never expected to receive.
Genealogy research is full of these moments—hoped-for finds that are like unexpected gifts. Your discovery may not be 100 years old; it might simply be something that captures a part of the life of someone you love. Whether you’re just beginning your family history or have been at it for years, don’t overlook school yearbooks. You never know what snapshots of the past you’ll uncover.