The post I *meant* for last week!
I failed to post anything last Wednesday and didn’t realize it until my Friday post went live. This happened because when I was drafting my posts, I didn’t have the photos from my daughter’s wedding I wanted to share and I forgot to go back and finish drafting and scheduling.
So, you get those today instead!
This was a very small wedding, held at the Redwall Castle near Germantown, Maryland. My youngest child, Mileidy, and her partner, Elliot, both suffer from anxiety disorders and they wanted to have (literally) a small, fairy-tale princess wedding. I think they succeeded – and their choice of venue looked the part:
The man of honor and both fathers spoke at the reception. For my speech, I focused on the fact that my youngest child was the first of my four children to get married, and how happy I was that she got to be first at something after years of being the littlest.
The family of the couple outnumbered the guests by a little bit, and my two rambunctious granddogs, Jinx and Bug, were delighted to meet so many people.
Elliot is transgender/non-binary and prefers they/them pronouns, so we are still figuring out how best to refer to them in posts like this one. “Child-in-law” feels condescending; “son-in-law” is acceptable to Elliot, but feels inaccurate. “Person-in-law” works, but in the end, “Elliot” works best. The important thing is that they looked amazing for their big day, and everything went as smoothly as could be expected.
We were told a few weeks ago that the new couple would announce their surname after the ceremony, so I was eagerly waiting for that moment. They chose a name derived from Greek mythology, Eleos, an ancient Greek word that means mercy, compassion, clemency, and pity.
I love that they were able to choose a name that reflects who they are, and how they want to live their lives.
As a family historian, I took some time to ask Elliot how they feel about some of the issues that transgender people encounter when it comes to genealogy. Their family has been researching their Ownbey/Owenby ancestry, and they have some familiarity with how records inform the way we think about people.
General practice requires documenting a person’s name at birth, and some platforms, like WikiTree require that “NAB” to be the primary identity for that individual. This is obviously a problem for many trans people, who often find themselves pushed away from their families or choose to suppress their “dead name” as they assert their personal identity. Of course, not all trans people share the same experiences or traumas, and the issue of documenting names is not unique to the transgender community.
For some individuals – notably Scandinavian ancestors from the pre-1900s – how their names are rendered is a matter of conflicting cultural traditions. Some cultures run into difficulty finding the “correct” way to render surnames; Hispanic traditions vary and cultures from around the Mediterranean region don’t use specific surnames, so “name at birth” becomes difficult to know at all, in the context of typical white/European surnames.
I have talked about this with both Elliot and my son, Cam (who is openly trans-masculine) and they each have their own comfort level with how I handle their birth names. Since both are still living (and I hope they will be long after I’m gone) their WikiTree profiles will be their business and no one else’s. However I’ve learned a lot, despite the small sample size, and I plan to keep an eye out for other families with transgender members to see how they handle documenting their lives.
LGBT people tend to be under-represented in the genealogy community, but if you have questions or answers and want to talk (publicly or privately), I am here!
Mightier Acorns 
Say hello, cousin!