Family Tree problem

[Emma in England]

Just for fun, I'm researching my family and putting everyone into Filemaker.

Each person has a 'Father' and a 'Mother' field where I input the IDs of the parents. I have a 'siblings' relationship where other individuals sharing the same Father and Mother are displayed in a portal.

I would like to show an individual's children in a portal too. But I want a relationship where 'FatherID = ID' OR 'MotherID = ID' and that doesn't seem to be an option.

I know I'm probably thinking of this in the wrong way, can anyone put me straight?

[comment]

Use a calculation field =

FatherID & ¶ & MotherID

[Emma in England]

Thanks, that didn't quite get me there, but when I did another calculation 'MeAndSpouse', which was ID & ¶ & SpouseID for men and other way round for women, I was able to create a relationship based on that and yours! Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

Luckily the world economy is NOT going to depend on this database!

[comment]

If you define a calculation field cParentsIDs as FatherID & ¶ & MotherID and a relationship as:

People::PersonID = Children::cParentsIDs

you can show the children in a portal. You are doing the same thing from the opposite direction - but what if a person remarries?

[Emma in England]

Re-marriage is indeed a problem. These wretched Victorian men would marry a woman, foist on her a child a year until they died, then marry another! I've gone up to '2nd Spouse' and will just have to duplicate other relationships. So far that's been the limit....

[comment]

You should have more tables. At minimum, I think, you need a join table of Unions (marriages and less formal associations). Then an individual can be a child of a union, rather than directly of the parents.

A more flexible approach would have another join table between unions and their children, so that a person can be a biological child of one union and an adopted one of another, for example.

[Dave Graham]

I'd recommend a PARTYRELATIONSHIP table which can join two parties together, and a PARTYRELATIONSHIPTYPE table to define the nature of the relationship. Now it is flexible enough to handle any kind of relationship.

Based on the relationships that you've created directly, you could then programmatically determine other relationships indirectly (e.g., cousins, etc).

[Emma in England]

Lots of food for thought there - thanks! I'll keep playing with it. More tables looks like the way forward, so far it's all been self-joins!

[comment]

You might also want to read up on the GEDCOM standard and its data model - this might be useful if you ever want to share your data with a GEDCOM-compatible application or web service.

[Lee Smith]

Hi Emma,

I have been doing my Family Tree for a couple of years now.

If you do a search for [color:blue]+Family +tree (use the pluses) you will get 250 (the max return) post on this topic over the years. I narrowed it down to those with attachments, and

Here are two of them that have attachments.

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/59076/post/59076/#59076

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/173005/post/189937/#189937

I have also tried out the different Family Tree commercial products, and decided for the price, it was easier to use MacFamily Tree.

I also joined Ancestry.com and have been spent several hours following the links.

HTH

Lee

Edited January 16, 2009 by Guest