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In the ninth grade everyone was a dork, right? That's what I tell myself anyway when I look at my ninth grade photo in my school yearbook.

It wasn't one of my better Kodak moments. When my brother saw my picture he laughed and asked if I'd just seen a ghost.

Actually, there were a few kids in the ninth grade who looked quite cute in their yearbook mugshots. Those perpetually cute people went on to be varsity cheerleaders and homecoming king and queen.

Fortunately, whether you were photogenic in high school isn't a sure-fire predictor of future success and happiness. That's why the media gets a kick out of hunting down high school pictures of famous people. It's the classic "look at them now" story.

For family history researchers, there are no "look at them now" opportunities when we trace our ancestors. We can only hope for a chance to "look at them then."

Pictures of our ancestors even a few generations back can be hard to come by. If you're lucky you might find your ancestors as awkward adolescents lurking on the pages of a high school yearbook.

First of all, you need to scan your family tree and try to determine who actually attended high school. Prior to the mid-19th century, education in America was a haphazard affair. Schools weren't plentiful and attendance wasn't mandatory.

Generally you're more likely to find high school attendees in your family toward the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th century. City dwellers attended high school more often than rural relatives simply because cities had more public schools.

Education levels varied from generation to generation and access to education often depended on the circumstances. Even if your grandfather didn't go to school beyond the eighth grade, don't assume that his father didn't make it to high school either.

Great-granddad might have lived across the street from the local high school, then left the city and raised his kids on a lonely homestead 24 miles from the nearest high school.

Once you've pinpointed who may have gone to high school, you need to figure out where the family lived during those teenage years. Trace the ancestor's parents by using the usual records: census records, city directories, tax records, deeds and so on.

Next, you need to determine if the local high school where your ancestor may have roamed actually produced yearbooks. Early forms of yearbooks appeared around the 1840s. In the 1880s, with new developments in printing techniques, high school yearbooks, complete with photos, started to gain widespread popularity.

Just like education, yearbook production could be sporadic. The high school my mother attended in rural Kansas, for example, didn't roll out its first yearbook until the 1950s. So, where do you find yearbooks? If the school still exists, start there. Many schools have copies of the yearbooks in their libraries.

Local public libraries also often have large collections of yearbooks. Nearby colleges or universities might have some in their libraries.

Check the state archives and state libraries. Most have online catalogs that you can search. Be sure to search for "yearbook" and for "annual."

Digital images of yearbooks are finding their way onto the Internet. A good Web site to peruse is Old-Yearbooks.com.

Yearbooks are also popular sellers on eBay and at antique shops.