Editor’s note: This is a non-political post on a subject that has inexplicably become political, and is merely a family history post discussing genealogy techniques. If this subject bothers you please skip it or at least keep your comments non-political. We will delete your comments and ignored if you can’t.
The hobby of genealogy, as we now practice it, became popular in the late 1800s when membership in lineage societies such as the Sons/Daughters of the American Revolution and the General Society of Mayflower Descendants helped promote it. Genealogy has evolved quite a bit since those days, as has the types of data applied to our ancestors. In the late Nineteenth Century the terms we used for immigrants, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ people, or African Americans were so archaic that most people now consider them slurs.
That evolution followed the progress of society and we are in the middle of exactly this type of social evolution in our lifetimes. The LGBTQIA+ community continues to gain recognition and our genealogy needs to evolve accordingly, and we’ve given a lot of thought how we’ll address it.
Early in our journey to document our family history we made discoveries that upended conventional family lore, often secrets intentionally buried decades ago, and we had to decide how we’d proceed. Our North Star on these discoveries became that we’d tell the truth as we knew it because researchers 100 years from now are going to find our work and will want to know the complete stories we’ve uncovered. Additionally, these truths are fundamental to the story of our family and why we are who we are, so we’ll share them.
But there is a level of respect and love called for in how we tell these stories. For instances one of our biggest discoveries involved living relatives and we consulted them and their children on how best to proceed (Link).
Limits of traditional genealogy for newly accepted mores
The design of our genealogy tools reflects the assumption of a traditional American nuclear family. Family Tree Maker still assumes the opposite sex when you enter a new marriage fact as well as noting parents of a child as “Spouse” even if they were never married. Ancestry follows these traditional notations as well as limiting each person to Male, Female or Unknown genders when many official bodies recognize other options. However, over half of the US States recognize (or have previously recognized and issued documents with) “X” or “other” as valid genders, which challenges our ability to note the truth of these documents.
For instance, if a child is born male and, during their first 20 years, gets a driver’s license, graduates high school, and enrolls in college under one name and gender before later transitioning, the historical record could be totally confusing 100 years from now. Without context, a new woman appears to have graduated college, gotten married, worked various jobs, and renewed her driver’s license, seemingly out of thin air.
A future family historian likely be able to link what looks like two children to the parents, guessing they had two children, one who died about age 20 and the other about the same age establishing all sorts of records but nothing before the age of 20. They could also trace their ancestors back to this child and quickly find a brick wall because they can find no record of them before adulthood.
Properly recording facts for our Trans family
When we were faced with these issues in our tree, we first asked our Trans family and friends how they would like us to approach it. They largely hadn’t given it much thought, but they recognized both the inherent risk of using what they know as “dead names” (which are so named because they are hopefully never to be used again) in our quasi-official documents, as well as wanting to accurately preserve historical records for later generations to consume and understand.
The solution we arrived at was to use “at birth” attached as secondary facts. For a trans family member their current name and gender is noted as default, and we attach their dead name and original gender as secondary facts.
Adapting our tools to integrate our LGBTQIA+ family
We use Family Tree Maker as our primary family tree tool (link), which allows us to define custom facts. We’ve defined the custom facts “Name (at birth)” and “Sex (at birth)” in FTM and use those to attach sources listing original information. We keep those facts flagged as “Private” to ensure that even though the person is alive (which makes all their records hidden by default), these facts will remain private even if we choose to share info on living relatives. This is an extra step to respect our family member’s wishes, and ensure we don’t create reports, etc. where we’d accidentally share this information.
Another of our favorite family tree tools, RootsMagic (Blog link), allows for custom fact types as well, but we run into challenges using some online tools. FamilySearch and MyHeritage both allow for custom facts and we’ve been able to create “at birth” facts on each, however Ancestry does not allow for this. Given that Ancestry is the largest commercial ancestry website, and it has our default online integration with both FTM and RootsMagic, this limitation means we’ll be restricted in sharing these elements publicly when the time comes.
Marriage/Relationship facts
The question of how we will capture various relationship facts is related to our LGTBQIA+ family, but not exclusively. We sit at a time where social mores on adult relationships are more broadly defined and we are moving past the European notion of one lifelong marriage.
Divorces are much more common today, as are parenting relationships that never included marriage. Beyond that, “modern” marriage traditions increasingly include same-sex relationships, polyamory, non-traditional/non-official marriage (like handfasting), etc. We are left to decide how best to capture these relationships properly for history’s sake with tools that are not ready for relationships outside of husband and wife.
For instance, our tree has children born to couples who never married and Ancestry, MyHeritage and Family Tree Maker want to default the parents’ relationship to “Spouse”. We can manually override that and select relationships like “Partner”, “Single”, or “Other”, but that’s a small list for accurately capturing relationships.
Other tools like FamilySearch don’t make it as clean or easy. Trying to create the same relationship for a child of a never-married couple results in a convoluted mess. Technically we can capture the relationship, but you can only view both parents from the child’s record.
Flexibility falls by the wayside when we try and document polyamorous couples. Polyamory is emerging as an increasingly common relationship type, but none of our tools are yet able to effectively capture these marriages. Non-traditional partnerships cannot be accurately recorded in our tools, nor can the parenting arrangements their children were born into.
Make it work!
Our family 100 years from now will likely be much more versed in these notions than we are today, at the dawn of this evolution. They will be expecting the information we have and regardless of the tools we use and regardless of the evolving nature of our family’s relationship our job is to capture our family history as we know it during our time. It’s important we capture these facts with truth and detail so the genealogists that come behind us can build off our work.
In many ways, given the current limitations of capturing this information formally, our work may be the only records that can decode the truth of our people and we need to ensure we capture it completely and with respect to the people who are living these new ways to fully enjoy their lives.