I recently bought a baby journal to keep records of all of my baby’s firsts and histories, which I plan to give him when he has children of his own. But I’m stuck on the first page, in which I am supposed to put in my family tree. You wouldn’t think this would be complicated, just my mother, father, grandparents, brothers, sisters, etc. The thing is, my biological father died when I was seven and I was adopted by my mother’s current husband (who is an awesome dad). To make matters more complicated, my brother has a different father.
Then, a few days later, I was doing some research into interaction models and was going through Geni.com, an online genealogy tool. I quickly came across the same issue. There was no way to say I had two legal fathers.
Although my family is complicated, I know I’m not alone in this matter. As mothers and father remarry and have children with successive spouses, more and more people of our generation have complicated families. The family tree seems to be an outdated model for trying to capture this information. It seems like our families are more like spider webs or molecules.
As I have tried to figure out what to put in my baby’s book, I remembered a graphic my brother did of his immediate family, which really shows the complex nature of our families (see below). I may just draw up my own graphical version of my family history and tape it into the book.
My brother Aaron's family tree
