Help:Adoptions and Multiple Parents

Categories: WikiTree Help | Styles and Standards | Relationship Editing Help

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WikiTree only allows a person to have one mother and one father. This provides the basic structure for family trees. Therefore, with adoptions, step-children, etc., a choice needs to be made.

Choosing Parents

For private profiles with direct connections to living people, the family can choose which parents to include. Note that if the adoptive parents are used, they should be marked as Non-Biological. This will prevent incorrect DNA test connections.

For public profiles without connections to living people, genetic connections should prevail. This is a choice that our community has made: our tree should be genetic.

For example, if you were adopted you can choose to enter your adoptive or biological parents as your mother and father. If your great grandfather was adopted, you should use his biological parents, if or when they are known.

Including Other Parents

Although a profile can only have one mother and one father, you can and should include the person's full story in their biography (privacy considerations aside).

You can add links to other family members in the text like this:

Rex was adopted by [[McTester-95|Maddie McTester]].

And on the other side:

Maddie adopted [[Sample-4|Rex Sample]].

Conflicting or Sensitive Choices

As explained above, for non-living people genetic connections should prevail. However, there is flexibility when living people are involved.

What if some family members would like to see genetic connections but other family members would not?

In these cases, it may be appropriate to create a duplicate profile.

For example, let's say that Rex wants to explore his genetic heritage but considers his adoptive family his "real" family and doesn't want to risk hurting anyone's feelings.

Rex could create a second profile for himself. He could create links between his two profiles and explain the entire situation, or keep the profile secret if it's very sensitive.

Someday when the issue is less sensitive, Rex or his descendants should merge the two profiles.

It's important that the use of duplicates be rare and unusual. It violates basic principles of WikiTree. See point I of our Honor Code on collaboration.