Family as a grafted tree

Recently I have been very interested in my family ancestry. Many of my literature courses focus on our concepts of ethnicity and the concept of home. Coming from a family of divorce and adoption these are interesting for me to define. Which sides of the family do I feel the strongest ties with, how do you visually represent divorce but a family evolving to continue as a unit, etc.

It is a common mistake that people confuse my last name with the Sequoia tree. Similar sounds, very different spelling and meaning. Looking at photos of these trees their expansive but hidden roots come strongly to mind. I imagine my father's biological family this way, the creation of the tree but hidden. The branches are much farther from the roots illustrating this distance between the adoptive and biological families. I would place my nuclear family somewhere on the trunk trying to bridge these familial ties. What about the splice of a tree trunk? Who do the rings represent and how do we choose where it began from? Do these rings relate to the branches and roots?

I am also interested in how to represent our patch worked family in a less traditional way. Similar to how I am interested in people piecing their land to create home I am very interested in how people piece the people in their lives to create family; the aunt who was a childhood best friend or next door neighbor your children grew up calling papa, all of these nontraditional parts being so important.