I was just wondering if it is ever appropriate to include information about second wives, and about adoptive parents, on a family tree. ANd how would you include this info? Obviously, from a genealogical standpoint they are not "correct" but from a general historical perpective, it is information which is important to somebody!

If you click "edit this person" on a profile page and go to relationships you can change a relationship from biological to adoptive or step or a number of other choices. You can add more than one marriage fact. Neither of those would be possible if it wasn't appropriate.
Some adopted children may have no desire to discover their biological family tree. That's their choice.
Are you not going to research a first or second family because they're only your 1/2 cousins? Of course you don't HAVE to include them. It's up to you but it certainly is appropriate and correct.

-Loretta
Barking Up the Wrong Tree Blog

Thank you very much for your reply.

I am talking about my own children...my first wife was adopted, but it seems to me they would like to see some info about her adoptive parents. And my daughters husband was adopted, and the grandkids certainly look upon his adoptive parents as "family".

I will figure out how to annotate these things on the tree.

Again, thank you very much for taking time to help out.

It may not be known to apply at all in your eclectic family, but at times people want to look into ancestry for the purpose of detecting whether there may be an inheritable genetic pattern, such as susceptibility to heart disease, diabetes, etc. For this reason it can be useful to folks in the future for there to be pretty clear documentation of there being adoptive parents who would not be in the inherited genetic scenario.

Among the possibilities are entering explanations as "comments" or uploading an explanation in PDF format.

I will make sure to document all entries fully. Thank you very much for your comments.