Ancestry.com is the world’s most popular genealogy site, with some 27 million members and 100 million family trees. If you want to keep track of your family history, Ancestry is a good place to start. But how can you document your adopted family at Ancestry.com?
Don’t worry; it’s easy
Creating a family tree that shows your adopted family can be challenging. From the kindergarten assignment to make a chart with your child’s parents and grandparents to the family history information you may keep for your healthcare professionals, it can be tough to find the right kind of forms or to make a clear chart. Your adopted child’s birth certificate will show only the adoptive parents, but there are situations in which you might want to have records of the biological parents as well.
At Ancestry, that’s easy. Go to the record for your adopted child. You probably already show the relationship between yourself and your child, as shown in the screenshot below. That’s the usual way to start documenting your adopted family at Ancestry.com. Suppose you want to show the names of the birth parents as well?
Click on “Edit relationships” on the drop-down menu under “Edit” in the top right-hand corner.
Once you reach the screen to edit relationships, you can choose “Add alternate father” and/or “Add alternate mother” to put in the names of the birth parent or parents. You can use drop-down menus to identify the Adopted and Biological parents, as shown below.
Once the two sets of parents are in place, use the “Make preferred” buttons to show which relationship you want to show on your family tree. In the case shown below, the adoptive parents are the primary relationship, so the biological parents show the “Make preferred” buttons. Clicking on them would change the primary parents shown on the family tree.
How will the tree look?
Once you have added all the parental relationships — both genetic and legal — and set the preferred choice, your family tree will show the relationships you have chosen as preferred.
Below the listing for adopted parents you can see that there are “additional parent relationships” to explore. Click on that and it will open the information on the birth parents, as shown below.
Is this information private?
Keeping track of family records and information can be very challenging. Tools like Ancestry.com can make it much more manageable to collect and organize information. But can just anyone see your family tree and all that information?
Ancestry has a comprehensive Privacy Statement that outlines how they collect, use, store, and share your data. This is the authoritative answer to how private your information might be.
Information about living individuals in your family tree is generally kept private by default and not visible to others unless you choose to share it. Deceased individuals’ information is not hidden unless you choose to hide it. You can see what that looks like in the screenshot below.
You have control over who can view your family tree. You can make it public, private but searchable, or completely private. A public tree allows other people to use your data for their own research. A private tree allows you to store your information without sharing it, or to share it with individuals (such as your own family members) as you choose.
This is not one of the big issues you’ll face on your adoption journey. It’s more like a small question, but we have a simple, clear answer for it. You’ll find that Heimer Law can answer your questions about adoption in Arkansas, big or small.
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