Date
1 - 3 of 3
Recording a family member linked by IVF
James Pam
I completed a DNA test through Ancestry. One match was with an IVF donor concieved family member who I have now made contact with.
Her father wants his details to remain private. From information she has given me, I can identify two brothers, one of whom is likely to have been the persons father. I am anxious to protect the anonimity of the father but would like to note the existance of the donor concieved child and her two siblings who share the same father. I have made a private note against both brothers, protected with square brackets. Any further advice on how to record this link would be welcome. |
|
uhkh3tsccmz9@beconfidential.com
It sounds as if you have identified the father by "jig-saw" identification (putting together the pieces). If you make enough of those pieces public others will be able to identify the father by jig-saw identification.
If you want to "protect the anonymity of the father", I would keep all the pieces outside your tree, the conceived child, the circumstances of their conception, the two brothers and possibly the two siblings (because if you record them it opens the question as to why their (IVF conceived) sibling is not showing). It will just be an undocumented and hence invisible branch of your tree. In genealogy there is no obligation to record all information! My late mother (who was adopted) has her genetic lines documented outside the family tree, because her paternal family I think have no knowledge of her existence (or of course the circumstances by which she was conceived). I have made the decision to effectively leave two of my six grand-parents out of my family tree. It's not worth the risk of causing very grave offence. |
|
Adrian Bruce
On Sun, 31 Jul 2022 at 19:11, uhkh3tsccmz9@... <uhkh3tsccmz9@...> wrote: ... If you make enough of those pieces public others will be able to identify the father by jig-saw identification ... We're missing an important bit of information. If James was talking about his tree in Family Historian, then that bit of info is - does he ever publish it, or any part of it, in any fashion? Whether through reports, extracts, charts or whatever? If the answer to that is "No" then it doesn't matter how the information is recorded within FH. All the tactics in the world are pointless if no-one ever sees your data. Conversely, if someone has access to your PC and so to your tree, then they see what you see - everything. If, on the other hand, there is a possibility that James will run off some reports (or charts or...) then he needs to be a lot more careful. If people appear for - apparently - no good reason, then, as argued above, any genealogist worth their salt can ask the question "Why are they there?" and then often work things out from the hints. I would be tempted to record the potential father and their own relatives just as plain text enclosed in privacy brackets attached to a note against the child - no other individual records or anything. Certainly, it's tempting to leave them out altogether and just write them up as notes in a document held elsewhere, but then unless you're really organised, you're liable to lose the stuff or accidentally put it into a shared area of your Dropbox or whatever... So that's not always the answer. Adrian |
|