Families Grouped together

[vangie]

Hi,

I want to make a church database grouping families together and identifying each persons position in the family while still having each family member with an individual profile, i.e. birthdays, anniversaries, position, classes, memos, possibly donor info.

How do I do this?

Thanks

 

[KeithWilliams]

Hi,

Start by creating a table called Person with the following fields:
FIELD NAME TYPE
PersonId Autonumber
HeadOfFamilyId Integer
FirstName Text
LastName Text
Date Of Birth Date
etc.

Create a form to add / edit person details. The PersonId value will be generated automatically by Access. The HeadOfFamilyId should be populated by a lookup facility that allows the user to select an existing member of the database as the head of the family. This could be as simple as a ComboBox listing the members of Person, where the PersonId = HeadOfFamilyId (i.e. all existing heads of families). To make a new person the head of his / her family, set their HeadOfFamilyId to the same value as their PersonId - you may need to write a script to do this.

With this table set up, you will be able to group families together by sorting / grouping on HeadOfFamilyId.

You may need to create separate tables for Classes, Memos etc, but you haven't given enough detail to be precise. These additional tables should include a PersonId field so you can join them back to the person they relate to.

Hope that helps,
Keith.