Three mementos from my grandfather SHERMAN LINN SHAW II's high school graduation have been preserved among the many papers and photographs that I inherited from my grandparents. The first is an official transcript of his grades for all four years that he attended Lee Center High School. The second is a formal -- and very beautiful -- invitation to his commencement exercises, which took place 29 May 1930 at Lee Center Congregational Church. The third item is my grandfather's high school diploma, which is enclosed in a lovely cover. Printed on the back of the diploma is the graduation roll of Lee Center High School's Class of 1930, along with the class colors, flower, and motto. It seems that in those years, Lee Center High School may not have produced yearbooks -- or at any rate no yearbooks have been found among the mementos and records of my grandfather and his older sister Eleanor -- but the information included with the diploma, and the high quality of the commencement announcement, may have been intended to make up for the lack of a yearbook.
A notable thing about these mementos is that all of them spell my grandfather's middle name with a "y," rather than an "i" as his birth record and almost every other document show. In fact, in all of the papers and records pertaining to my grandfather's grade school and high school education, his middle name is always spelled "Lynn" rather than "Linn." It is unclear to me what accounts for this difference in spelling. On the one hand, it is known that our Linn ancestors originally spelled their surname indiscriminately as "Linn" or "Lynn," and then in the 1800s and early 1900s, different branches of the Linn family settled on one spelling or the other. Could it be that when my grandfather was a child, he varied the spelling of his middle name from time to time? Or, because he and his father had the same name, did he perhaps opt for the "Lynn" spelling in those years as a way of distinguishing his name from his father's? Or was it simply that the school had initially misspelled his middle name, and persisted with the misspelling throughout his grade school and high school years? (On the other hand, if it was the school's mistake, why is the middle name spelled "Lynn" on my grandfather's personal graduation card, which he would have ordered himself?)
The high school records are reproduced below. Some of the images have been enlarged to make it easier to read, while others have been shrunk to make them easier to view on a computer screen.
Return to Ten Generations of the Shaw Family (Part Seven)