I have a table called Parents, in some cases the mother may use many surnames
I tried having a separate table with just surnames, but then I had to remove
other adults i.e. partners and fathers. Also to run a listbox query on the
network was a nightmare. Then I thought about having additional fields????
Maybe set a limit
of 10 surnames (this may sound like a lot but it really is not considering
some of our clients. Whats your thoughts?
I'd suggest a Person (Parents) table, related one-to-many to an AKA
table (Also Known As). This second table could have all the names
under which the person is known.
You certainly would NOT want a table of all the valid surnames - it's
not an easily closed list (there are hundreds of millions of them and
anyone could, formally or not, choose a new name nobody has ever had),
and there is no necessary connection between Smith, Smith, Smith and
Smith.
I don't see why you would need to remove other adults, especially if
you're using the AKA table; you would have a table of people, and one
of those people might be a mother, a different person a father, a
third might be the mother's current partner. Each of them could have
any number of aliases.
John W. Vinson[MVP]
