How we decide who's dead

From the page to your class

1. The cover. We read the school and the year off it, and if the class is already here you go straight to it.
2. One photo, ideally yours. It shows us how your yearbook lays out its names and crops its photos, so your other photos read better.
3. Your class. Quick, overlapping photos of each page, or a scan. Each portrait is cut out and its name read, and when someone is in several photos we keep the clearest. You check the names before anything is searched, since a misread name can't be found.
4. The matching. Every classmate is checked in the background, and the dead are marked in red with their years.

How a classmate is matched

For each name we gather everyone in our database with the same or a sound-alike surname, or, for anyone who may have married, the same first name and a notice that mentions your school. Then each piece of evidence is weighed by how telling it is:

• Surname. A shared rare surname counts for a lot. A shared common one counts for little.
• First name. Nicknames count: Bob is Robert, Peggy is Margaret.
• Birth year. Most people graduate the year they turn 18. A birth year that doesn't fit all but rules a record out.
• Places. Dying in the town where you went to school, or nearby, fits. People move, so elsewhere only lowers the odds.
• Your school. An obituary that names your high school is the strongest evidence there is.

The candidates are then weighed against one another and against the likeliest answer of all: that your classmate is alive, or died somewhere we have no record of. How likely that is depends on the age of your class, from life tables. If two records fit equally well, neither is marked.

What we get wrong

We miss people far more often than we mark the wrong person. Anyone who died without a notice online, before notices went online, or somewhere outside our records won't be found, and nor will a name the scan misread. When we do get one wrong, anyone looking at the class can tell us with the flag on that person's photo, and we look into it.

Your class is shared

There's one class per school and graduating year, shared by everyone who scans it: if a classmate scans the page you missed, it shows up for you too. Its link is long and random, so nobody stumbles onto it, but anyone with the same yearbook can find it by scanning the cover. The names you scan are yours to fix for a day, and then they're part of the class.

Living classmates are shown as nothing more than the photo and name printed in your yearbook. We never look anything else up about them.

Following classmates

Signed in, you can star a classmate. If we later find a notice that looks like theirs, we'll email you, with a link to the notice so you can check it yourself before telling anyone.