Naval Academy Yearbooks

What did Samuel David Dealey do when he was a student at the U.S. Naval Academy in the late 1920's? Not much, it turns out. I know this because there is a digital collection of Annapolis yearbooks available online. Here is the link to the Nimitz Library Digital Collection. The actual yearbooks are hosted over on the Internet Archive.

The best way to access the yearbooks is through the Nimitz link. All issues from the first one, in 1894, through 1970 are available.

So what about our fellow, Sam Dealey? I wanted to find out more about this guy for an article I was writing for a military history magazine. Sam went on to be one of the ace submariner skippers of World War II, and one of the most decorated serviceman in American history. What was he like at Annapolis?

He graduated in 1930, and each graduate was given a write-up by his friends that sort of encapsulated how they viewed him and his personality.

Go the the landing page (link above) and then look for Browse All in the upper left. A list with all the yearbooks loads. Scroll down to 1930 and click on that. When the 1930 page opens click on the link next to the cover photo. This opens the book in the Internet Archive. Type Samuel Dealey (or whoever or whatever) into the search box and click Go and wait. In Sam's case, six bookmarks popup - only one of which is relevant to our project, his class listing on page 198.

 

Over there on the left is our guy. The listing includes his nicknames (only "Sam" stuck) and the activities he was involved in during his four years at the Academy. This information helped give me a broader picture of who Sam Dealey was. It was worth the effort.

The Nimitz Library has a wide range of archival collections available to researchers, and more and more are being digitized. I'd like to thank Dr. Jennifer Bryan, Head of Special Collections for helping me find this stuff.

If this post was helpful or interesting to you, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to improve the blog. 

Disclaimer: The description of web pages are accurate as of the date of the post. Like everything else in this digital world of ours, they can change in the blink of an eye.