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Non-traditional Family Trees: Homosexual Relationships

Mary Koeven

Non-traditional family trees are increasingly common. No matter how unusual or un-traditional, genealogists should record all family events and relationships accurately. In this series, you will learn how to record these complex family situations clearly in your family tree. In this post, you will learn about recording homosexual relationships.

Regardless of whether you believe that individuals in homosexual relationships should be allowed to marry or raise children, currently same-sex marriage is legal in the United States, Canada, the UK, and other countries, and same-sex couples raise children. A truly accurate genealogy must acknowledge and record these facts.

The following article discusses how to add a homosexual relationship to your family tree or genealogy database. Other articles in this series discuss adoption and step families, which may also be relevant for homosexual family trees (see below for links).

Software That Allows Homosexual Relationships

Homosexual marriages and partnerships can be tricky to manage in genealogy software. As they are not “traditional,” some programs do not support them. If you try to change the gender of a spouse, you will be given an error message. Fortunately, some developers have realized the need for homosexual relationship support and have included it in their software.

The following desktop genealogy programs have the ability to record homosexual marriages (according to Wikipedia):

There is no equivalent list for web-based genealogy software, but I have tested for this feature in some of them. The following programs also allow the recording of homosexual relationships:

Homosexual Relationships on FamilySearch

One popular online software that is not designed to record homosexual relationships or marriages is FamilySearch Family Tree. Some may assume this is a moral protest because FamilySearch is sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but this is not true. FamilySearch has plans to implement this feature, but first they need to have it working and integrated properly with all their other features. Because FamilySearch is a nonprofit and not a for-profit business like Ancestry or MyHeritage, they don’t have as many engineering resources. Fewer engineering resources means it takes longer to implement new features. I’ve been following FamilySearch development since they began, and this is nothing new. They always take a long time to roll out new features. Ron Tanner, the Product Manager for FamilySearch.org, has stated recently on the FamilySearch Support Message Boards that they expect this functionality to be available sometime in or after 2019.

Update: This feature has still not been released, but at Rootstech 2019 FamilySearch officially announced their intentions to have it up and running by the end of 2019 as part of updates to their GEDCOM X protocol. You can keep track of FamilySearch updates by following their blog.

Update 2020: FamilySearch now allows same-sex relationships to be entered into the tree. You only need to add a spouse/parent and select the appropriate gender.

Entering Homosexual Relationships on Ancestry

On Ancestry.com, you can add two parents of the same gender to a person, or add a spouse of the same gender to a person. All you have to do is change the gender when you are entering the person’s information. This is what it looks like:

If you go to the person’s main profile page, and look in the right hand corner where it says “Edit,” click on that and it will bring down a menu with an option to “Edit Relationships.” I circled the button for you here:

You can add an alternate father or an alternate mother, and change the relationship type for each parent. You can also choose which set of parents shows up in the main tree view by clicking on “set as preferred.”

So in this example, “Test Test” was born to John Doe and Hannah Sample, but his biological parents were either divorced or his father died. His mother remarried to a woman named Jane Test, who became his stepmother. See my articles on step families for more tutorials on this aspect. Future tutorials will focus on adopted children and non-married couples as well.

Other Programs

It’s actually very simple to add parents of the same gender to your database, if the program you are using supports it. All you have to do is change the gender of one of the individuals. Some programs will not let you do this, or will give you an error message if you do. There is a workaround for these programs: simply make one of the couples the wrong gender and attach a note explaining that they are actually male/female and the program won’t let you change the gender. There are obvious problems with this approach. I recommend that if you use this workaround, you only use it in a database that you plan to keep to yourself, so that others don’t get confused about the genders of the people involved.

I hope this series on recording non-traditional family trees has been helpful. Feel free to comment with questions or discussion of my tutorials.

More tutorials for non-traditional family trees:

For more tips and resources for talking to your children about your non-traditional family tree, see this excellent post by Emily Kowalski Schroeder on Growing Little Leaves: Family Trees for EVERY Family

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