Displaying Adoptive Families

[brasso 0]

My mother was adopted as a young girl due to an accident. She has just started to contribute to the family database held on TMG – which usually has person, sibling and children windows open. She is properly shown as part of her first family on her birth parents windows – and listed amongst her brothers and sisters in the children/siblings windows. But when she looked at her adopted parents windows, she didn’t appear amongst her other brothers and sisters, except as a Dau(Ado) tag in her adoptive parent’s person windows. This caused some distress, as she sees herself as fully part of both families. I have her birth parents as primary, and showed her that I could form her other family by temporarily making the adopted parents primary. Which caused more distress, as she felt she had to choose between her parents.

 

We're only beginners with TMG, but I know that only one set of parents can be designated as primary – but is it possible to have TMG display adopted children in the children/siblings windows for both birth and adopted families? I tried setting her up as two people, one in each family, but that seems to cause confusion.

[Michael Hannah 0]

This is an issue that has been discussed quite a lot, and one I particularly care about as I am adopted. You might first check the forum topic on Adoption sentences for some suggestions.

 

For cases just like yours I have developed a custom method of creating two people entries in TMG for the single human. One "TMG person" covers the events in that human's life up to adoption using their pre-adoption name, and the other "TMG person" covers the events after adoption using their subsequent name. I then have a custom tag that links these two "TMG people" together with an appropriate sentence. Each "TMG person" can then be linked as Primary to the appropriate set of parents, and thus will show in each set of parents' list of children. For example, Mary (born) Smith shows in the Smith family, and Mary (now) Jones shows in the Jones family. This also works nicely in Second Site as the custom linking tag provides a quick link between these two sets of events and "people". And you can make the sentences for each "TMG person" read in whatever way makes sense to you.

 

Hope this gives you ideas,

[brasso 0]

Many thanks Michael - that was a really good solution. Just a few minutes work gave pretty well the right result.

[Michael Hannah 0]

Glad that works for you. The advantage for me is that I do not have to "choose between parents" as your mother mentioned; you get to have both.