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.

Curiosity and a desire for medical history often motivate donor-conceived people to search for their donor or other donor relatives. Social-media platforms offer donor-conceived people and their donors opportunities to search for genetic relatives. This chapter takes an in-depth look at how Facebook was used as a search and surveillance tool by the Australian participants in our national study of donor-conceived adults, recipient parents and donors, including their views about acceptable and more controversial uses of the platform. We argue that the affordances of Facebook and the developing cultures of use by members of the donor-conception communities normalise online surveillance of donor relatives. Our research demonstrates how easy it is to find and watch genetically connected others without knowledge or explicit consent. Our research raises questions about how the concept of contact should be understood in the digital age as donor-conceived people and donors navigate virtual boundaries across social-media platforms.