June is Pride Month — a time to celebrate visibility, honor those who fought for equality, and remember those who came before. As genealogists, we are in a unique position to ask a question that rarely gets asked: What happened to the gay and transgender people in our own family trees? Where are they hiding in the records — and why have we been so slow to look?
The answer, it turns out, is that they have been there all along. They appear in census records as "boarders" living with a close "friend" for thirty consecutive years. They show up in obituaries that mention a "devoted companion" but no spouse. They surface in criminal court dockets, in asylum admission logs, in the coded language of nineteenth-century diaries. Our LGBTQ+ ancestors did not disappear from history. History simply did not know — or did not care — to record them honestly.
This Pride Month, let's change that.
The Language Problem
Before we can find our LGBTQ+ ancestors, we have to understand how they were described — and how they described themselves — in the documents of their era.
The word homosexual did not enter the English language until 1892, coined by a German-Hungarian journalist named Károly Mária Kertbeny. Before that, same-sex relationships existed in abundance, but they were categorized differently: as acts rather than identities, as sins rather than orientations. In colonial America and well into the nineteenth century, same-sex intimacy was prosecuted under sodomy laws inherited from English common law — laws that framed the behavior as a crime against God and nature, not as evidence of a particular kind of person.
This distinction matters enormously for genealogical research. Your ancestor who was arrested for "sodomy" in an 1840 court record may not have identified with any label we would recognize today. But the experience of attraction, of love, of a life built alongside someone of the same sex — that was real, and it left traces.
Similarly, what we now call transgender identity was described in historical documents using terms like "inversion," "contrary sexual feeling," or simply the notation that a person "dressed and lived as" the opposite sex. The nineteenth-century medical establishment, heavily influenced by German sexologists such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and later Richard von Krafft-Ebing, began categorizing these experiences clinically — pathologizing them, yes, but also, for the first time, documenting them in systematic detail.
For genealogists, this medical literature is a remarkable, if uncomfortable, resource.
Hidden in Plain Sight: The "Boston Marriage"
One of the most common places to find same-sex partnerships in the historical record is the phenomenon known as the "Boston marriage" — a term used in late nineteenth and early twentieth century New England to describe two women living together in a long-term domestic arrangement, typically financially independent of men.
These partnerships were often tolerated, even admired, by contemporary society. They appear in census records as two women sharing a household, listed as "friends" or one as a "lodger." They appear in wills, where one woman leaves her entire estate to her companion of forty years. They appear in letters — and here is where genealogical research gets genuinely moving — in language of unmistakable devotion.
The writer Sarah Orne Jewett and her partner Annie Fields maintained such a household in Boston for nearly thirty years after Fields's husband died in 1881. Their letters survive. So do those of countless ordinary women whose names we do not know, stored in attic boxes and local historical society archives, waiting for a descendant or a researcher to read them with clear eyes.
When you find two women sharing a household across multiple census years — 1880, 1900, 1910 — do not automatically assume they were sisters or simply economical roommates. Look at their ages, their occupations, their wills, their obituaries. Ask the question.
The Men in the Records
For men, the historical record is more often a record of persecution than of partnership. Sodomy laws were enforced with varying intensity across time and geography, but enforcement was real, and the court records it generated are genealogically significant.
In the early twentieth century, as American cities grew and men began to congregate in boarding houses, saloons, and parks, municipal vice squads began systematic surveillance and arrest campaigns. The records of these arrests — in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia — are preserved in city and county archives, and they contain names, ages, addresses, and physical descriptions. Finding an ancestor in such a record is jarring. It is also informative.
The period between the two World Wars saw both increased visibility and increased risk. Gay men and lesbians developed vibrant subcultures in urban centers — Harlem's "pansy craze" of the late 1920s, the lesbian bars of Greenwich Village, the drag balls that drew thousands of spectators. Then came the crackdowns: the post-Prohibition liquor licensing laws that allowed states to revoke the licenses of bars that "permitted" homosexual patrons; the federal government's systematic purge of gay employees beginning in the late 1940s (the so-called "Lavender Scare," a parallel campaign to the Red Scare); and the pre-Stonewall police raids that made simply existing in community a criminal act.
Discharge papers from military service are another crucial record set. After World War II, the military began issuing "blue discharges" — neither honorable nor dishonorable — to gay and lesbian service members. These discharges denied veterans their GI Bill benefits and marked their records for decades. If your ancestor served in World War II and received an undesirable discharge without a clear explanation, this may be the reason. The National Archives holds many of these records, and researchers have increasingly been working to identify and honor these veterans.
Transgender Ancestors: Looking in New Places
Transgender ancestors are perhaps the most difficult to locate in the historical record, because the documentary trail is so often deliberately obscured — sometimes by the individuals themselves for safety, sometimes by families who later altered records, sometimes by institutions that simply did not have the vocabulary to record what they were seeing accurately.
And yet they are there.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, individuals who lived as a gender different from the one assigned at birth appear in newspaper accounts (often sensationalized), in hospital and asylum records, in immigration documents, and occasionally in their own writings. The soldier Albert Cashier, born Jennie Hodgers in Ireland, lived as a man from at least the 1860s until his death in 1915, serving in the Union Army and drawing a veteran's pension for decades. His story was "discovered" only when he required medical care in old age. The records of his military service and pension exist in the National Archives.
Harry Allen, who lived as a man in the Pacific Northwest in the early twentieth century, appears repeatedly in police and court records in Washington and Oregon — not because of violence, but because vagrancy and cross-dressing laws were used to harass and detain individuals whose gender presentation confused or threatened authorities.
When researching a transgender ancestor, look for inconsistencies: a name change between census years with no obvious explanation, a death certificate that contradicts a life history, a military or institutional record that conflicts with family memory. These inconsistencies are not errors to be corrected. They are evidence of a life lived.
Practical Steps for Your Own Research
So how do you actually look for LGBTQ+ ancestors in your own family tree? A few starting points:
Revisit "bachelor" and "spinster" ancestors. Extended singlehood was not unusual historically, but a person who never married and maintained a decades-long close relationship with one particular person of the same sex is worth a second look. Check for shared households in census records, shared graves, and mutual mentions in wills.
Read the obituaries carefully. Before the modern era, gay and lesbian partners were often acknowledged obliquely — "survived by his longtime companion," "a devoted friend of many years." These phrases were sometimes the only public acknowledgment of a relationship.
Search criminal and court records. Unpleasant as it is, the policing of sexual and gender nonconformity generated records. City archives, county courthouses, and digitized newspaper archives are your friends here.
Look at institutional records. Psychiatric hospitals and "reformatories" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries admitted patients specifically for same-sex attraction and gender nonconformity. If an ancestor disappeared from the family record with no clear explanation and then reappeared years later, this history is worth investigating. Many state archives hold these records.
Trust the letters. If your family has preserved correspondence, read it carefully and read it generously. People in love find ways to say so, even under constraint.
Why It Matters
Genealogy at its best is an act of radical honesty — a commitment to seeing our ancestors as they actually were rather than as we might wish them to have been. Our LGBTQ+ ancestors lived full, complicated, often painful lives. Many of them were isolated from family, denied legal recognition of their most important relationships, persecuted by the state and sometimes by the church. Some found joy anyway. Many found each other.
They belong in our family trees. They belong in our stories.
This Pride Month, consider opening a new branch of your research. The records are imperfect and the language is sometimes uncomfortable and the history is often hard. But the people are real — and they are waiting to be found.
Have you found an LGBTQ+ ancestor in your own family research? Share your story in the comments below. Resources for this type of research include the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries (the world's largest repository of LGBTQ+ materials), the Digital Transgender Archive, and the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives in Chicago.
