How do I enter an adopted child?

Question

What do I do about his parents?  

Do I fill in adoptive parents and enter in the Biography  that he was adopted? 

I can't find anything in HELP about this. 

Answer 1

I think it would be misleading to put adoptive parents in the parents slots. However a person may feel about adoptive parents, they are still not the biological parents.

I'd put the adoption and adoptive parents in the biography. If they have profiles in their own right then link them and refer to the adoption with link in their profiles.

I'll be interested to see what others think, but there ought to be a policy.

Comments

I have no knowledge of actual parents, Only adoptive.

Can I leave parents blank?  Should I?

This would be a disconnect in the family.

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If it's the best information you have, Tom, I would certainly add adoptive parents as.. well, parents! They were (whether biological or adoptive) the person's legal parents. It's also likely that some records will indicate the adoptive parents as the person's parents.

The bio can provide other information.

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This is why I think we ought to have a policy. If the biography has the adoptive parents marked and linked then there is no disconnect, except at the top of the profile. In my view that is the correct way to look at it, unless we have a separate section at the  top for adoptive parents. In a case where both were known then the biological would appear at the top and we would have confusion if other cases had the adoptive parents there.

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A policy might help. But, at present, I don't believe there's anything requiring that the links to parents must be exclusively biological. IMHO, wikitree's goal is accuracy, and adoptive parents of a person are, in fact, the legal parents, and (albeit without a policy saying it's inaccuate) would be accurate to so indicate.

Don't press me for specific citations, but (as I remember) there are several published genealogies that list adopted children under their adoptive parents with notations.

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Not a policy, but a guideline: http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Adoptions_and_multiple_parents

Essentially, we do not put them in the parent 'slots' because it will produce 'false' results for DNA matching.For living people, discreation is advised (see the above cited guideline) as it is not a simple academic question.

Including a link in the bio to the parents, and conversely including a link in the parents bio is the best way to approach this - the same can be done for children who had multiple foster parents, or who associate a step-parent rather than a biological parent as 'father' or 'mother'

 

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Since the biological parents are not known I put the adoptive parents in the parents slots and below 

==Biography==

insterted

==Genealogical/Adoptive disconnect==

figuring that would attract the attention of those needing the information.

Solution found. 

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Fair enough. Guideline. I think that mnakes good sense.

My real objection to putting adoptive parents in the top slots is mainly inconsistency. If someone's biological parents are unknown, I'd expect it to say so clearly.

Another point is - are we talking only about legal adoptions? There were plenty of adoptions in the past that were not legally recognised (or we don't know whether they were). That is much better dealt with in the biography.

Answer 2

I'm adopted also. I put my adoptive parents as my mom & dad then checked the non-biological box. I'm going to address the adoption in my biography. Hope this helps

Comments

Kimberly, doing that - adding a person who did not contribute genetic material to your creation and marking them "non-bioligic" was a so-calked fix created to passify a small but vocal minority who prefered the lineage of their adoptive family over their actual roots. It ABSOLUTELY effects the DNA structure of the tree in a negative fashion. To prove it, I added my two "adopted children" and flagged our relationship non-biologic. Both these adoptees are of the species canis lupus familiaris. Both are flagged as non-biologic relations to me. Both appear as siblings to my real daughter. When reviewing the DNA Ancestors report for my bitch Camera-53, the system says that she inherited her X chromosome and mitochondrial DNA from my family - despite the profiles being marked non-biological and the two of us being seperate species.

http://www.wikitree.com/treewidget/Camera-53/89

Likewise, the Wikitree DNA Ancestor report of my male German Shepherd insists he gets his X chromosome contribution from my lineage.

http://www.wikitree.com/treewidget/Britton-1494/89

If these blatent errors exist on non-biologic profiles that so obviously do not carry any human DNA, much less mine, I shudder to think what kind of DNA mess will be on the tree after 10 or 20 years of adding non-biological "relatives". When the option of adding adopted parents to the profiles of adoptees was limited to only private profiles, the worst that could happen is that after the death of each party in the triad, decendent geneaologists who attempt to use DNA technology to prove their lineage will detect the absence of any shared genetic material and will disconnect the parents. Who knows how they will detect or correct the real relationships if the database is showing connections flagged as non-biologic as sharing chromosomes and DNA.