Chapter 14 - THE FAMILY TREE
The corrected anniversary book required a new modern-family section.
Everyone immediately wanted to overcorrect.
One cousin proposed:
Adopted descendants should be specially celebrated.
No.
Why specially?
Another suggested:
Explain adoption law in a footnote.
Absolutely not.
Elsie did not need a legal disclaimer beneath her photograph.
The archivist solved it.
Family tree convention:
Legal parent-child relationships displayed equally.
Where historical researchers needed biological-genealogy distinctions, those appeared in a separate technical appendix with privacy restrictions for living minors.
Simple.
Elsie appeared beneath my name.
ELSIE AVERY, DAUGHTER.
No asterisk.
No parenthesis.
No adopted.
Because the main family tree described family.
The genealogical appendix described genetic lines where appropriate.
May you like
Two different questions.
Problems become easier when people stop forcing one diagram to answer both.
