This month, on the 28th of June, we mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village, New York. Stonewall was the watershed event sparking the modern gay rights movement. Our planet has come a long way in 50 years in acceptance of Lesbian, Gay, […]
Newspapers are a major resource for genealogists that can fill in personal history like no other record can. The same is true for finding LGBTQ family, especially if they had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Police raids on queer clubs was […]
When researching materials for this LGBTQ Genealogy lecture I came across a treasured photo blog called HomoHistory.com. The site, published by Jeffery Gent, preserves and shares vintage photographs of Gay & Lesbian people. There are 100’s of beautiful and touching images on this site. I strongly […]
The term “Partner” was used in State and Federal census enumerations in the 20th Century. An example is the 1915 New York census entry for Anne Clark and Adele Albro, enumerated as Partners.
Use of the term “Partner” was vaguely defined in […]
Genealogists use census records to track individuals and families over time and place. Finding an ancestor living with the same partner over subsequent census records is a good clue that they were in a committed relationship. An example from last month’s blog is Willa Cather.
Willa was a Pulitzer price willing […]
One of the first records sets genealogists consult is the United States Decennial Census. The United States Census Bureau maintains a webpage for “Famous and Infamous Census Records” which highlights pages over the decades that list celebrities, both good and bad.
Amongst this listing we […]
I first came upon the term “Present-ism” by reading Thomas MacEntee’s blog. Present-ism is the awareness of cautiously not applying today’s cultural norms to past societies. This applies to all genealogy subjects and applies especially to LGBTQ ancestors.
Our ancestors did not self-identify as “gay”, “lesbian”, “bisexual” […]
When writing our ancestors stories, we want to tell the most truthful account of their lives that we can. Yet when it comes to LGBTQ ancestors I hear some family historians say they don’t want to “out” their ancestor. Or that their ancestor chose to keep this part of […]
As genealogists, we reconstruct our family history from genealogical records. We attempt to discover who our ancestors were and what types of lives they led. Marriage and Birth records confirm relationships and essentially tell us who our ancestors were having sex with. Until recently those marriage records only proved heterosexual relationships.
Lesbian, Gay, […]
