Adoption can be a lengthy process. Sometimes there’s a lot to do and sometimes you’re waiting. One project you might enjoy during the waiting time is discovering or developing your family tree. You’ll enjoy sharing your family heritage with your new child and it’s a good way to save the information you learn about his or her biological heritage as well. When the day comes that your child needs to create a family tree for school, you’ll have the information handy — and you’ll have made the decisions you need to make about how to document it.
Online tools
Tools like Ancestry.com, Geneanet, and MyHeritage help you find your ancestors and keep track of the information you discover. Since so many people have already shared their information at sites like these, they may already have a lot of information about your family. You can also fill out simple forms with the information you know, check census and other official records, and ask questions of others studying the same families.
These tools make it easy to show adoptive relationships. For example, Ancestry.com uses a drop-down menu to show biological and adopted parents, as well as guardians and stepparents. You just check the correct relationship and the software will remember both the biological and adoptive parents.
MyHeritage uses a similar system.
If you have some information about the biological parents, you can often find more data about their family history, sometimes including their health history. This information can be valuable or interesting to your child in the future — but it can also be uncomfortable to ask.
Family tree charts
Online tools can often create charts of various kinds showing the relationships. This is a fan chart:
This is a tree chart:
These are the two most common shapes for charting family trees. You will notice that they are divided two by two: the two parents, then the two parents of each of those individuals, and so on. Artist Tony Matthews, who has created a number of books of family charts including many for adoptive families, points out that the most basic approach to a family tree is this simple geometric one:
For an adopted child, however, it is possible to divide the parents’ section of the tree into three parts: the adoptive father, the adoptive mother, and the birth mother. It could also be divided into four parts to include both the biological father and mother. The diagram below shows placements for biological parents — either one or both — in blue.
Two fan charts put together to form a circle could show the adoptive family in the top hemisphere and the biological family in the bottom one. A tree style of chart is often presented as an actual tree; for an adopted child, the adoptive family could form the tree while the biological parents make up the roots.
This can be a creative project, or you can find blank forms to download and print. Tony Matthews’s books are available at Genealogical.com and FamilyTreeTemplates has a wide selection of adoptive family tree charts to fill out.
Either way, this can be a loving project for the whole family and a good way to pass the time while you wait!