Recursion question

I'm an old programmer from the PL/C days.

I've been spending time over the past few days looking up recursion as it works in FileMaker. I have an application that has a record id along with a father id and a mother id.

I would like to write a recursive function that would go through the table assigning a relationship identification to each record. For example, the father record would have a "F", the mother record a "M" the father's father's record would be "FF", the father's mother's record would be "FM".

I know this type of activity can be accomplished using recursion, but I'm getting stumped in how to pass the id's to the calculation. It appears in FileMaker, I can't directly reference data within the calculation. All of the examples that I've looked at have the data passed to it in the parameters.

I want to be able to walk the entire table but I don't see how to approach it within FileMaker.

I would appreciate any insight that anyone would have.