Today, being 29 March 2014, marks the first time that same-sex couples can marry legally in the UK.
Although the press are evenly split between making much of how touching and full of love the weddings are, and bewailing that this is the End Of Days and we will all be struck by lightning (or floods - see comments by Councillor David Silvester of Henley on Thames about the true biblical nature of the 2013-4 weather and accompanying flooding here at the BBC), I think it is interesting to consider this great step in a purely genealogical way for a moment.
In their fight for the right to make their union publicly recognised and supported and to be given the same support by their surrounding community that heterosexual married couples can access, same-sex couples are also seeking a change in the way future generations are able to see them. The couples that married at a few minutes past midnight today - Peter McGraith and David Cabreza, John Coffey and Bernardo Marti, and Andrew Wale and Neil Allard are the most widely known - now have a formal record of a previously unrecognised union that future generations can search for, locate, gain a copy of and recognise. What a significant movement on from a century ago, when such unions were illegal and many families had a distant uncle with a "housemate", or a spinster cousin who shared a home with "her good friend" "for companionship". These relationships could not be recognised within the public record at the time and the knowledge of them is often lost as future generations go forward, particularly if these unions were childless (as they often must have been in the past). Although civil partnerships have been available to same-sex couples since 2005 (via the Civil Partnership Act 2004), which gave many of the same protections to same-sex couples as marriage did to mixed-sex couples, the civil partnership index (which is kept in the same way as the indices to births, marriages and deaths, by registrars and public record offices) is not easy to consult and people tend not to think of checking it as part of the process of researching family history. Additionally, in a world where statistics suggest that more than 50% of children may be born outside marriage by 2016, anything which leaves a mark in the public record is to be welcomed by future generations of family historians. The only "problem" with a birth outside marriage is that the child's birth certificate cannot lead to the parents' marriage certificate, which would give parents' ages and grandfathers' names. A link in the chain of evidence is lost and must be sought elsewhere.
Family history, evidential integrity and statistical accuracy aside, though, today's change in the law can only be welcomed from a human point of view. More people who love each other are now able to make a public commitment to each other which enshrines their rights and responsibilities simply, within law and society, by virtue of one single piece of paper which also fixes them within the line of their family (through reporting father's names), friends (often witnesses) and locality (where they choose to marry). Future generations can celebrate too. What's not to like?
And as an aside, I've been looking at the idea of the End of Days. Some groups maintain that the chaos of the end of the world will be followed by a period of deep peace and harmony as all races come to know goodness and each other. So we're not there yet!
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