Children of the same donor and their families, with the help of the Internet, can now locate each other and have contact. This chapter explores the new forms of relatedness that have emerged with the growing availability and use of donor gametes. Specifically, I ask: how do donor-conceived youth situate their donor siblings in relation to other important relationships in their lives, such as friends and siblings who also live in their nuclear families? How do they actively construct these new relationships with newfound donor siblings and where do they fit within their families? Based upon in-depth interviews with teens and young adults who live in the United States, the varied understanding of these relationships is explored, including filling voids around identity, resemblances and the wish for “siblings”, the difficulties of forming new relationships and how heteronormative understandings of the bounded-nuclear family have sometimes become more fluid.

Over the last two decades, researchers have sought to understand whether and to what extent donor-conceived people are motivated to seek contact with donors and donor siblings. This chapter contributes to this literature by focusing on donor-conceived adults’ everyday experiences living with anonymity and absence across the life course. Drawing on the concept of ‘haunting’ and combining reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with Australian donor-conceived adults (N = 28) and vignettes of personal experience, I elucidate how anonymity and absence reshape flows between past, present and future, altering personhood and relationality. I argue that framing anonymity as an issue of the past (re)produces ongoing haunting and that reform without concomitant processes of truth-telling and redress represent an injustice to those who continue to live with the lingering impacts of such past conditions. More broadly, this work expands sociological conceptualisations of family by attending to how familial (non-)relationships shape belonging.