Randy Seaver posted a blog last week about his most exciting genealogical discovery.
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\nI am quite certain that the blog did not intend to deliver the message I took from it; nonetheless, it bothers me.<\/p>\nRandy’s most exciting discovery is that his second great-grandfather was adopted.<\/p>\n
I understand the thrill of finding new information. I have yelled loudly in public places and danced around the room while security guards were summoned to deal with the crazy person. Discovering that one of your ancestors was adopted is <\/em>exciting. It’s part of the story and, as genealogists, once we move out of the name-collecting phase the story is what we care about.<\/p>\nBut Randy goes on to say that he had to excise an entire pedigree from his family tree. He does say he kept the family in his database; I’m not sure as what. Now he is looking for the bio parents. I assume they will replace the other family in the tree.<\/p>\n
No, please no, it has to be the other way around.<\/p>\n
My favorite cousin is adopted. We share a family; my 2nd great-grandfather is her second great-grandfather. There’s a reason we have phrases like “biological parents” and “birth parents.” It’s to distinguish those people from the real<\/em> parents. My cousin has found her birth parents and has some new cousins. That’s great. You can’t have too much family. (Well, of course you can, but we don’t have to talk about that).<\/p>\nHere’s the point, really, I’m getting there. I don’t want to be excised! Future researchers, reading this long after I’m gone, if reading is still what you do, don’t excise me! It hurts. My whole crazy family, whoever’s womb they emerged from, needs to stay together. I don’t care how long I’ve been dead, I’m sticking with my cousin.<\/p>\n
So the good news is Randy gets to keep a lot of folks in his tree and the bad news is….for once, there isn’t any bad news.<\/p>\n
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I haven’t posted anything for quite a while. This is probably not the best way to dive back into the pool, but I read something on a blog recently that disturbed me and I can’t get it out of my …<\/p>\n
Don’t Excise Me! Love Makes a Family<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[311,74,75],"class_list":["post-5887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc","tag-adoption-genealogy","tag-cole-family","tag-silver-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5887"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5894,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5887\/revisions\/5894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}