When will my being named as a father show up in Ancestry.com?

April 16, 2019 11:48 AM

I was named as the father. I did the DNA test. It's mine. Now I'll be paying all associated support the court names. However I've been basically keeping this to myself. The question is, how long does that last? If you're named as a father on a birth certificate, how long till that shows up in Ancestry.com (where my sister and I share an account)? Or, for that matter, other publicly searchable databases? I just want to know how much time I have til I have to tell my own family.
posted by anonymous to Grab Bag (9 answers total)

It will never show up on your family tree unless you - or your sister who shares the account - manually adds your child as a relative. Ancestry.com's trees are created only through crowd-sourcing. You can copy from other people's trees, but no one outside of your account can add to yours.

The service does provide access to historical documents (census records, birth & death records) which can include information about familial relationships - and the system will send users "hints" when it detects a possible match. However, as far as I know, these are only available after a certain number of years for privacy reasons. For the census, this can be up to 100 years. I recently received a "hint" for my grandparents' marriage in NY State in the 1950s, but I've never seen any birth, death or marriage records from later than 1960 in the system.

Public records - like telephone books or voter registries - are available for more recent periods (e.g. the 1980s), but don't include information on parentage.
posted by jb at 12:01 PM on April 16, 2019

It depends on the state, but as a general rule you have until the person in question is 75 years old before the certificate becomes public record. So assuming you are not ~95+ years old you have some time.
posted by brainmouse at 12:01 PM on April 16, 2019

This depends on the place where the birth is recorded, since different states e.g. have different policies.

But just quickly looking at what ancestry.com has that covers recent births, the two biggest seem to be:
- Virginia birth records up to 2014
- U.S. Newspaper Birth Index 2005-2015
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:51 PM on April 16, 2019 [2 favorites]

Birth certificates aren't generally kept on line and states vary in their practices concerning the availability of family court records.
posted by praemunire at 1:31 PM on April 16, 2019

jb has got it right. I'm super into genealogy and have never found a birth record for anyone probably from 1940 onward. I've had to send away for those and say whether I'm next of kin or not. I do not think this will become public record for quite some time.
posted by jdl at 1:46 PM on April 16, 2019

If anyone within about cousin level in your family has submitted a DNA sample to any of the ancestry databases, once your kid turns teenage they might be able to do likewise and start asking questions to your direct family.
posted by scruss at 2:14 PM on April 16, 2019 [8 favorites]

Right now Ancestry has birth records in these collections, and probably more. This is just from a quick search and not comprehensive. It seems to just depend on the state, assuming you're even in the US. It doesn't look like anybody is putting them on ancestry the same day or anything, it seems to be a few years old, but there isn't a uniform policy barring them.

state-level:
California, Birth Records from Select Counties, 1872-1987
California Birth Index, 1905-1995
Kentucky, Birth Index, 1911-1999
Massachusetts, Birth Index, 1860-1970
Minnesota, Birth Index, 1935-2000
Nevada, Birth Index, 1975-2012
North Carolina, Birth Indexes, 1800-2000
Texas, Birth Index, 1903-1997
Virginia, Birth Records, 1912-2014
Vermont, Birth Records, 1909-2008

misc including:
Illinois, Select United Methodist Church Records, 1824-2009
Montgomery County, Indiana, Birth Index, 1880-2010
Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, Birth Index, 1865-2012
England and Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index, 1916-2007
posted by LobsterMitten at 2:26 PM on April 16, 2019 [2 favorites]

If birth happened in Utah, you might want to know about this.
posted by armeowda at 10:46 PM on April 16, 2019

If the baby momma adds the child to her ancestry and includes you as the father your sister may get an alert about a possible match to her. Highly unlikely is my guess.

My cousin who uses ancestry.com found out recently that she is not really my cousin, because it ends up she is the result of an affair her mother had (we had been related via my father's brother). My cousin -- who I still consider my cousin -- messaged me to alert me of this because she didn't want me to find out via ancestry.com. However I received no such alerts -- to date.

Suggest starting the conversations on your terms as soon as possible.
posted by terrapin at 9:47 AM on April 17, 2019