i reached out to the good people at Github to answer the question of forked repositories not tracking added upstreams and this is what i got back:
Every clone has its own list of remotes. So each time you create a new clone you'll need to add back your preferred remotes. For this reason, it is often better to have one clone of a repository on each computer you work on and then pull changes and updates as they are published rather than creating a new clone for every task.