using self referencing relationships and scripts

I am working on developing a geneology type solution that would recognize a request made to one person, and would log the request in each of that person's ancestor's files. i.e. I would run a script that would register a request for that person's name, and add a counter to him as well as adding a counter (a different counter) to each of their direct line ancestors. I would want to track how many requests had been made for each person during each month, and create a report listing the results.

Currently I have the name, name ID, the ancestor name (which is keyed to name) that I think are related to this solution. I have 10 instances of the table in my relationship graph all referenced to each other, because I'm only worried about going up 10 generations for any single person.

would I need a 'counter' field for each person? and if I wanted to track how high above each requested record the ancestor is, would I need 10 fields for each person? I'm thinking that I would try to build a script to add a counter to the each field for the 10 ancestors, but was wondering if there was a more efficient method.

Also, what would it take to print the monthly report? would I need a date logged in each request?

Also, is there a better way than building all those relationships to accomplish what I'm trying to do?

I know it's a long post, but I think that's it. Thanks in advance for any help.