In her 1999 book All About Love1, bell hooks offers up M. Scott Peck’s definition of love as one of the few clear literary explanations of love in our society. For Peck, love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” In a sense, this is why we do family history. We extend beyond our selves, into the past, to reclaim the stories of our ancestors, bringing them back to the present to make some sort of a difference. We find that family history quickly changes our lives and we reach out again and offer the fruits of our labour to our loved ones and our community, echoing the same message: these stories might change your life too.
That’s why family history fits so well with the message of LGBTQ+ Pride. The core struggle in queer peoples’ lives is the struggle for love. We crave love—the love of our family, the love of our neighbours, the love of our institutions, the love of our society. When our families of birth are not there to love us, we create new families. We create what are called “families of choice,” a term I first encountered in the book, Families We Choose by anthropologist Kath Weston.2 When society doesn’t recognise our unions of love, we do it anyway, on our own terms. Building family trees is something that queer people do without even thinking about it. It comes as naturally as it does to family historians.
I encourage you to carry on the spirit of LGBTQ+ Pride by reflecting on how you can reach out, in love, and make a difference in the lives of those around you. Share your stories. Share the stories of your ancestors. And if you’re interested in learning more about queer people in the past or how you can find your queer ancestors, here are some useful resources:
The Family History Podcast: The Salesman with Ulyssies Swanson
Andrew talks with Ulysses about the stories of some of his trans ancestors, how to research trans people in the records, and the Transgender Ancestors Project.
Dr. Norena Shopland
Dr. Shopland has created all sorts of resources about queer history in Wales. I highly recommend her work. The booklet, “Queering Glamorgan”, which she compiled with Dr. Daryl Leeworthy, offers practical ways to search for queer people in the historical records, and includes some historical background, terms to look for (in Welsh and English), and some of the sources where you can find your queer ancestors.
The Welsh County LGBTQ+ Timeline
These timelines can give you important social context with which to make sense of the stories of the queer ancestors that you find.
LGBT Family History with Stewart Traiman
Stewart gives a really great talk on LGBT family history that I’ve attended twice myself. Definitely check it out if you ever get the opportunity. Here are two podcast episodes where he discusses the topic:
Tracing Your Marginalised Ancestors: A Guide for Family Historians by Janet Few
Among themes like poverty, criminality, immigration, illegitimacy, mental health, and many more, Janet has a short section in her book about researching your queer ancestors.
- You can access this book for free through the Internet Archive. I HIGHLY recommend it, as well as anything bell hooks created during her lifetime. ↩︎
- Preview of Families We Choose on Google Books: https://www.google.ca/books/edition/Families_We_Choose/prYIC_uH474C ↩︎
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