Bio and legal parents in Family Tree

Susan Ann Mullen

First off. Please note that I am not a mod in this area. This is a question about my own families tree.

I was reading in another thread the way to list on the tree the parents of a person with both legal and bio parents is to make 3 parent lines. This is confusing to me. Is it the standard to have the legal/assumed line then one set of parents for each of the bio parents if they were married to other people? I had thought that there would be one for legal and one for the bio parents with the non bio married spouse not included. It doesn't make sense to me to add a spouse that had nothing to do with the child and in fact would be more embarrassing for them to be named if they were married at the time.

Any thoughts on this?

Gordon Collett

There are no standards. Like so many things in Family Tree, we have been provided with multiple options and methods of entering data then left to use the provided tools to describe our families the best we can in the configuration we feel is best to describe the history of our family. History is history. It's what happened, embarrassing or not. It's certainly easier to record the actual facts for things that happened 300 years ago than yesterday. It's also not always necessary to record everything that happened until everyone involved is long gone. That is why Mark Twain had his autobiography locked in a vault for 100 years.

I think the discussion where you were reading about two vs three sets of parents brought out the two different viewpoints of whether an unmarried couple who had a child who was then adopted should be recorded like this (pretend I put in a marriage event for the adoptive parents:

or this:

I think people tend to use the two set of parents style if the unmarried couple had a relationship for an extended period and the three set of parents style if the unmarried couple had a relationship for less than twenty four hours.

If either of the biological parents were married to someone else at anytime, then that would be a separate couple relationship without the child under it like this:

I don't tend to like the three parent set system because it can so easily turn into this final view with the inherent risk that someone will not pay attention and move the child to under the father and his wife incorrectly if someone doesn't read all the notes that any of these systems require. One reason people like the three parent system is that it prevents any implication as to whether the biological parents even knew each other or not. It also prevents the unmarried couple from ever being accidentally sealed or having the child sealed to them.

Like so many things in Family Tree, you have to look at your specific family and do what seems best.

(All examples created in Beta.familysearch.org, not the real site.)

genthusiast

I think it's just more of an option - for those wishing to carry on research for bio as well as step, adopted or legal parents (one certainly doesn't have to research those lines). But since it is a one world Tree - won't those relations be added at some point (especially if resulting in posterity)? So that there were multiple marriages does not mean one has to research all of those lines ...

Susan Ann Mullen

You may well be right that they will be added although I have run into situations where people related refuse to allow connections at all. It seems adding spouses would just incite anger reactions more than even adding only involved bio parents.

Gail Swihart Watson

annewandering It is probably my posts somewhere that you are referring to. I have an adopted relative I am doing research for on the birth lines. Birth mom and birth dad never married each other, they married other people. Birth mom eventually divorced her husband, and said husband remarried. Birth father had only one wife. Here is why is makes perfect sense to me to add a spouse that has nothing to do with the child. First, how do you know said spouse has nothing to do with the child?

Second, I am one of those who is a believer in information. I do not like ignoring a spouse just because that spouse is not related to the live relative I am researching for (adopted or not). There can be valuable ancillary information found in their histories. What I did that is questionable in my mind, is establishing a "step" relationship between my adopted relative and the spouses of each bio parent. In reality, my relative never met the steps, but in the relationship type options, it seemed like the best fit.

However, I never considered ignoring the spouses. I have been bit numerous times because I have ancestral lines through my mother who intermarried over a period of almost 200 years. In-laws are discovered to be family after all, and I keep discovering new instances, even this week. My adopted relative's bio parents come from such a location, too, where family groups have lived in the same place since the late 1600s. They are still there now. I discovered that bio mom married a second cousin. Relative didn't believe it, and arranged a 3 way phone conversation between us and bio mom (who is now in a nursing home), and she said I was right. If I had discarded that spouse as not related, my adopted relative may never have believed me as bio mom is very old. So now we know the relationship between my relative and birth mom's children is more than half sibling. And we also know that all of the children by the husband of birth mom are related to my adopted relative, even children of his second wife.

While all of this may seem like a quirky story, it may not be that unusual. I believe it is very, very important to research the communities of your lines to get a better picture of what marriage prospects were like at different points in history before you throw out "spouses". I think marriage prospects were very limited in ALL small communities in the new world through out the 1600s - 20th century, and if family groups stayed put for multiple generations, endogamy needs to be anticipated.

I hope this helps a little, and gives context to a different point of view.

Susan Ann Mullen

Gail S Watson, thanks for explaining your perspective. I see your point. In adoption and even in plain old family history research it is very helpful to find spouse information.

It is also important to realize that we have to look at the individual situation.

With an NPE, non-paternity event or misattributed parent, situation there are other issues. The wife may have not known. For that matter neither the bcf, ie: birth certificate father, or bio father may have known the child was NPE. In family trees we do not put the names of living people but if any of these people are deceased their information does show. It most likely will be embarrassing to close family members if the information is made public.

What do we do then? My answer has been, in at least one case, is to include the father's surname with the mother, both deceased, then add/link that surname to the proper family. It may sound cold but when the living people closely related die then either I, if I am living, or my family will add the given names. The father's descendants can merge or add the link to their mother as they wish. Does this seem a reasonable choice?

Gail Swihart Watson

So, you are sort of sliding into a related topic of managing live people, and adopted relative's grown son has been very involved and interested. Before I grow too old, we will make any changes he prefers to see on relationships. And hopefully I don't die soon. He and I have the occasional screen sharing meetings so he can see how I am organizing things, and are due for another soon. This is necessary as most players are still alive. All of those birth family members are warm and inviting with no embarrassment, and the husband of a half sister of adopted relative even sent me his family tree spreadsheet to look at.

However, I have a handful of adopted family members, all of us the same age. One did not find warm embracing relatives on the birth side. What was mixed in that relative's DNA matches were descendants of various women, all victims of violent assault. Your comments of embarrassment clearly apply (in spades), in fact that adopted relative is doing the tree, not me.