Ann Marcotte Shepherd, nee Ann Robart Marcotte, was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1918. In 1926, she moved with her family to Evansville, Indiana, and in 1935, the family moved to Portland, Oregon. She attended Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, then completed a bachelor’s degree in journalism at the University of Missouri in 1940. She returned to Oregon and worked as a journalist for the Bend Bulletin and for the Telephone Register. In 1942, she was hired by the Oregon Journal. In 1944, she and William Kemp Shepherd were married; they later had five children. From 1944 to 1945, she served in the U.S. Coast Guard, then returned to her job at the Oregon Journal for another year, before leaving the workforce to raise a family. In the 1970s, she co-founded the Portland branch of PFLAG. She was active in lobbying the legislature and other Oregon government officials on gay rights. She died in 2003.

Sources: Vital records on Ancestry.com; information provided by Shepherd in Oral history interview with Ann M. Shepherd (SR 4141).

PFLAG, formerly known as Parents, Families, & Friends of Lesbians and Gays, is a group which supports the rights of LGBT people, founded in 1972 in New York City by Jeanne Milford. The Portland chapter was started in 1977, when couples Ann and Bill Shepard and Rita and Charles Knapp founded a gay support group named Parents of Gays. This group elected to join the PFLAG National Network in 1982.