Family Matters: Handling “(Adopted)” in Your Family's Genealogy Record

July 19, 2011

By Jennie C., mother by adoption to one daughter

From the beginning, our families embraced our plan to adopt. When we adopted our daughter at birth in 2010, our families fell in love with her as much as we did and we have felt nothing but their love and support. E is a part of our family, period.

So, it took me by surprise recently when I received an e-mail that presented my first “adoption family challenge.”

I come from a large extended family and we have a reunion every other summer. Family members maintain an extensive genealogy that is updated prior to the reunion. One of my dad’s cousins e-mailed a reunion reminder to our part of the family and it included our “family update” with births, deaths, and marriages for the past two years, asking us to look it over for any corrections. Since E was born during this period, I quickly opened the file and scanned it to find her name. Everything looked great – name was correct, date of birth was correct – and then I noticed it. Right under her information in parentheses, it said: “(Adopted)”.

It bothered me at first. Not because it is a secret or that we are not proud of it. It is a fact that we adopted E and we love to tell our adoption story. We celebrate that she is a part of our family and has a birth family as well. And the more I thought about it, I seemed to remember from reading the family history years ago, that similar notations had been used for other family members who were adopted. So, I initially decided to let it go.

But then I kept thinking about it over the next few days and it still bothered me. Yes, E came to this family through adoption. But, that didn’t make her any less a part of it. And today families are created in such different ways, why do we need to put a label on it? Shouldn’t she just be included as our daughter and leave it at that?

After a quick sanity check with my husband and my mom to make sure I was not blowing this out of proportion, I composed an e-mail to send to my cousin:

We’re looking forward to the reunion! Thanks for being the coordinator of all the info. I read through the attachment and I would prefer that you remove the “adopted” in parentheses by E’s name. While it’s certainly no secret that E is adopted and is something that we are proud to share, I don’t feel like it is necessary to have in the update and reads more like an “asterisk” to me in terms of her place in this family. In this day and age, children join families through so many different ways – birth, adoption, donor eggs/sperm, surrogacy, through marriage as step-children, etc. – that it doesn’t make sense to me to put labels on them as part of the family.

After re-reading a few times for clarity, I pressed “send” and hoped for the best. I didn’t have to wait long and received this quick reply:

Looking forward to seeing you, too! I'll be glad to remove the word “adopted” from E's entry. I was just following the format of previous entries, trying to be consistent. I do see your point!

Success! I was relieved that the issue had been resolved and hopefully my speaking up will change the way our family handles the genealogy updates going forward. I am excited to attend the family reunion and introduce E to her extended family. We will be there, happy to share our adoption story with anyone who wants to listen, but knowing that our daughter is a part of the family, regardless of how she joined it.
 

Tags: adoptee , adoption , adoptive family , domestic adoption , family reunion , genealogy

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