Lawrence resident Ron Bogdan now has nearly 2,000 yearbooks in his collection. (Staff photo by Alexandra Yearly.)

At least 15 crates of yearbooks are piled along the wall of Ron Bogdan’s home in Lawrence. Stacks of books are piled around the fireplace, but are separate from the additional piles on his desk in the corner—and from the collections Bogdan has stored at other locations, that total nearly 2,000 books.

For the past five years, Bogdan, 53, has been working to reunite found yearbooks with the graduates from that class, running the business from his website, getmyyearbook.com.

Bogdan’s business started as a personal quest for his own precious yearbook. His father’s basement flooded during a hurricane in the 1980s, destroying Bogdan’s Willingboro High School yearbook from 1976. His link to his high school memories and to the happiness he felt there was gone.

“I have a very nostalgic draw to my past from high school,” he said. “We had a tough childhood growing up, and the thing was that school was a real outlet for me. I was the president of student council. I was connected to a lot of people.”

He went to the Willingboro public library and made photocopies of some of the pages, but Bogdan still wanted his own copy of the book.

About 10 years ago, he started using Internet search engines to advance his search. Though the search for his own yearbook yielded no results, Bogdan continued to find others from all different places and times. Most of them he could acquire for just pennies, and so he started to stock up.

“I don’t know why, but I started getting them,” Bogdan said. “I didn’t know exactly what I was gonna do with them. But before you knew it, I had 100 of them from different places.”

He realized he probably wasn’t alone in his feelings; if he felt so strongly about the value of his yearbook, others must feel the same.

When others became aware of his work, Bogdan was proved correct. Since he began searching, he’s reunited more than 600 yearbooks with school alumni.

Yearbooks can be found in a variety of places, and Bogdan’s network of resources numbers about 500. He finds books for clients in locations all over the country, ranging from flea markets, used bookstores and even from people who have bought storage lockers.

He focuses on finding books for “the average Joe or Mary,” but Bogdan has still stumbled upon a few gems. He didn’t think much of it when he added an Eastern District High School 1961 yearbook to his collection until eventually he opened it up to find Barry Manilow’s senior portrait.

He sold that book to a colleague who deals exclusively with famous individuals’ yearbooks, but for now, Bogdan still has another significant book in his possession: a 1948 Yale College yearbook that includes a short biography of senior George H. W. Bush, recognized as a war hero, and the mention of his son, George W. Bush.

But there was one book that he valued more than all of his finds: one he stumbled upon in a used bookstore in Cream Ridge. Only one Hightstown yearbook, dated 1955, was on the shelf. Upon closer inspection, Bogdan discovered it was his mother’s senior class yearbook.

“I grew up in a difficult childhood, and one of the side effects is that I don’t have a whole lot of pictures or things about my mother,” said Bogdan, who still has the book and no plans to sell it.

As for his 2,000 other yearbooks, Bogdan organizes them by number and location, and keeps Excel spreadsheets of his current stock and customer requests. When he does find books that don’t match up with any requests, he tries to contact members of the class through school Facebook groups to see if anyone’s interested in purchasing the book.

In most cases, it’s not collectors or history buffs who are searching for the high school, college and even junior high yearbooks. Instead, the consumers seek most of all to satisfy their feelings of nostalgia.

East Windsor resident Ron Meisner had never gotten a copy of his Trenton Central High School yearbook from 1972. He’d been searching for years for a copy, but it wasn’t until he joined classmates.com that he heard about Bogdan’s services.

“Sometimes you miss things from when you’re younger and you just want to go back and get it,” Meisner said.

Bogdan was able to get Meisner a copy in about six months, around the time of Meisner’s 40th class reunion.

A similar nostalgia was true for Trenton resident Velma McCoy. She had kept all her yearbooks in the basement of her home, except for her high school yearbook on a shelf upstairs. A few years ago, she hired someone to clean out her basement, and somehow, her Trenton State College yearbooks ended up in the garbage.

“I actually cried. I cried and I cried and I cried,” McCoy said. “When they were in the basement, I didn’t look at them that often, but knowing they were there was so important to me.”

Several years ago, McCoy, 73, contacted Bogdan about finding her books. He located her senior yearbook from 1960, and since then, has found her sophomore and junior yearbooks, too.

McCoy keeps the books safely on a shelf now, and often goes back to look at them when she sees a classmate’s obituary.

“It’s very soothing to me to go back in time over the years and make the associations with people and think about the things we did when we were teenagers because it’s so different now,” McCoy said.

Bogdan even located a book from the Bordentown Military Academy for former Trenton mayor Doug Palmer, who Bogdan said was overjoyed at the news. In fact, many of the successful finds for his customers often result in tears or unbelievable happiness.

In Bogdan’s personal quest, he’s finally found that same happiness. After receiving publicity about his search two years ago, an old high school friend got in touch with Bogdan to inform him he had two copies of the yearbook. The second yearbook belonged to his wife, who graduated in the same class. The couple agreed to part with one of the books to help Bogdan finally find what he had been looking for since the 1980s.

Though he gets requests for yearbooks from all different grades and years, Bogdan found the most requests, and the most meaningful requests, were for high school yearbooks.

“Any first time thing you can think of in your life, it ties into that time with those people,” Bogdan said. “And so that’s the reason why when we started to look back at our lives and we start to think in a nostalgic way, the common thread keeps going back to that. It keeps going back to that time with those people.”

That nostalgia has been the prime reason Bogdan has about 6,000 requests for yearbook searches, and continues to receive more.

For more information, go online to getmyyearbook.com.