Going Sky-ing at Thomas Jefferson High School

Just for the purpose of illustration, to give you a simple indication of the number of Jewish teenagers who once attended Jefferson and graduated in the pre-war years, here are a list of June 1937 grads whose last name ended in the letters -sky. We can assume that most all of these students were Jewish as indicated by their often used Jewish given names. Here are thirty-two -skys:

Antipolsky, Belsky, Biolostosky, Brodsky, Dolinsky, Cinensky, Kanefsy, Kanofsky, Kozimensky, Krinsky, Lubinsky, Miletsky, Mirsky, Natowsky, Olinsky, Orshansky, Ostrofsky, Patashinsky, Puhalsky, Razansky, Ruvinsky, Savitsky, Shetarsky, Sovronsky, Swidzensky, Tulchinsky, Turetsky, Uretsky, Wilensky, Wishinsky, Witofsky and Wolinsky.

Just imagine how many -skys can be found within the school's database of 47,000 graduates! Do your own search and see if you can find your own surnames of interest here.

June 1937 Thomas Jefferson High School Yearbook Now Online

I have finally been able to add another yearbook to my online searchable collection of Jefferson yearbooks, this one from June 1937. The graduating class numbered 764.

Thomas Jefferson High School is located in the East New York section of Brooklyn, New York. Jefferson was once (before World War II) one of the finest high schools in all of New York City. Especially during these times, due to the presence of many families of Jewish immigrants, a good percentage of the students were indeed Jewish.

You can either browse the yearbook cover to cover or do a search by graduate's name. There are now photographs of more than 47,000 graduates from seventy-four graduating classes. This represents sixty-five percent of all graduating classes from Jan 1927 (the first graduating class) to 2006. This is a great resource for Jewish genealogists, for those whose families once lived in this section of Brooklyn.

More yearbooks will be added in the future if and when they become available to the Museum.

Thomas Jefferson High School database addition

For those of you who had family in Brooklyn, New York, who lived there between 1924 and 1987, the Museum has a searchable database of more than 46,000 names of graduating Seniors, encompassing more than seventy graduating classes (they graduated two classes a year, in January and June).
You can search by name, school year, even by home address (at least for half of the students).
This is a useful genealogical tool, not to mention and educative one, as one can also browse any of the yearbooks from cover to cover--a virtual "time capsule."

Today another six hundred names have been added, from the graduating class of January 1946.

The link is www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/Jefferson/yearbooksearch.html.