Family relationships but not family tree

[terryc]

My database is a sixty five year history of nursing home residents - most of
whom are unrelated. But there are siblings, spouses, nieces, mother-in-laws,
children and grandchildren, etc. Anyone have any ideas of how to organize the
data so that the names & relationships could be displayed on a form/report
but without cumbersome data entry? I thought a family tree wouldn't work
because the relationships are so sporadic. I don't know how to write code but
do have a resource. I only have 2 tables - data and photos. thanks

 

[Allen Browne]

You are interested only in how these people are related to the care
recipient, not how they are related to each other?

If so, you will want a little lookup table of the kinds of relationships you
want to track:
RelationTypeID Text (24 characters) primary key

Now add another table with fields like this:
ResidentID Number relates to primary key of your Resident
table
RelationTypeID Text (24 charcters) combo of above list.
Surname Text
as well as other fields: a primary key, FirstName, phone, etc., and possibly
a Priority (Number) field to indicate which ones are the closest
(next-of-kin) for contact purposes in an emergency.

Now add a subform to your resident's form. The subform will be bound to this
last table. Use a combo for the RelationTypeID field. The subform will be in
Continuous Form view, so you can add as many rows as you need to enter the
person's relatives.

If many of your residents are related to each other and hence have the same
relatives, and so you don't want to enter these relatives multiple times for
the different relatives, you need a more involved data structure. There's a
downloadable example here:
People in households and companies - Modeling human relationships
at:
http://allenbrowne.com/AppHuman.html
But that may be overkill for what you need.

 

[terryc]

Thanks Allen.

I am interested in how the residents are related to each other. Thanks, as
well, for the downloadable example. I'll study it for your "overkill" ideas.