Summer Study: Prostitution and Genealogy

For the next several months, I'll be diving into the history of prostitution in America between roughly 1750 and 1950. I've assembled a stack of books that is honestly a little ridiculous. There are books about mining camps, port cities, Chinatowns, railroad towns, military posts, red-light districts, reform movements, vice investigations, and women whose lives landed them on the margins of society.

The obvious question is: why?

Because prostitution shows up in family history far more often than most researchers realize. Not always directly. Most of us don't discover a great-great-grandmother listed in a census as a prostitute. Genealogy is rarely that straightforward.

Instead, we find clues.

A woman living in a neighborhood known for vice activity. An unmarried mother with no obvious source of income. A daughter who disappears from the records for several years. A mysterious arrest. A hotel that wasn't really a hotel. A boarding house that wasn't really a boarding house.

The more family history I do, the more convinced I become that genealogy isn't just about finding names and dates. It's about understanding the social, economic, and cultural realities that shaped our ancestors' lives.

Prostitution sits at the intersection of all of those things. Immigration, poverty, race, law enforcement, new cities, old cities, work, motherhood, women's rights, survival...it all comes together. 

Many family historians spend years researching farmers, soldiers, merchants, ministers, and factory workers. Those are important stories. But people who lived on the edges of society deserve to be understood, too.

Over the summer, I'll be sharing what I learn here on Genealogy is Boring. Expect book reviews, research notes, surprising records, historical rabbit holes, archive visits, and probably more than a few moments where I discover that nineteenth-century Americans were far weirder than I previously realized.

If we're serious about understanding the past, we can't just study the people who fit neatly into family stories. We also have to study the people who were forgotten, erased, judged, misunderstood, or quietly omitted from the family narrative.

Those stories matter too, and frankly, they're usually a lot more interesting.

Curious to see the syllabus I created for myself or the book list I'm working from? Here they are.