My mother was adopted at age 1 and how do I set up a separate profile for her with her biological mother?

Question

Where do I add the new profile for the adopted person, at the top do I click on profile-new profile? Create a Profile for Anything page? At that page, what is "Location", "start date", "end date"?

Answer 1

To create a new person profile in this situation, click that "New Profile" link as you did, then select "Add unrelated people." Otherwise you're creating a profile for a place or a thing instead of a person.

Generally we don't recommend having two profiles for the same person. Obviously, that's counter to our "one world tree" mission. But it might make sense in a few cases and perhaps makes sense for you to do here.

The basic instructions on adoptions are here: http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Multiple_Parents

Since every person on the tree can only have one mother and one father, we generally recommend choosing whichever you feel is more appropriate and linking to the other parent(s) in the text of the page.

One reason it might make sense to have different profiles for your mother is if her name would be different too. That is, you want to include the name her birth parents gave her instead of the name her adoptive parents gave her. That switches the weight a little more on the side of two profiles.

Answer 2

Linda, I had a similar situation with one of my family and what I've chosen to do is similar to what the FAQ suggests (but not quite)...

I've created the foster/adoptive parents as separate people but linked to them through a standard paragraph that I've placed in the biography of all of the people involved:

It looks like this...

[[Gillham-25|Maisie Gillham]]'s biological mother was [[Gillham-30|Mabel May Gillham]] but there were plans for her to be adopted by [[Flinn-38|Thomas Horatio Flinn]] and [[Hill-5326|Lillian Elizabeth Hill]] before Tom's untimely death - here is [http://www.ncompass.com.au/tree/_THF&LEH.html their story].

(all of the bracketted text will be displayed as links to profiles or in the last case an external website)
A nice feature of WikiTree is that any link that is redundant (because it points to the page you are on) is automatically bolded instead of being a link.

Cheers

Comments

Great addition, Wombat. Thanks!