Linking "chains of Information

[jshes]

I am trying to build a report that can look at the current owner of a property, and track it through the sales documents to the original owner. I have tables set up for each of the properties (including when less than 100% of a property was sold) , the owners, etc. But I can only think of a couple of ways to link (string) the ownership over time together. (1) manually reviewing and linking each "chain" to the one before it until I get back to the original owner (which I really don't want to do) or some sort of VBA that will look at the current owner, then look to my list of transfer documents for that owner's name in the "sold to" column for that particular identified property. This would give me a chain from original ownership to current, which I would then link to a set of "master" documents which were signed by the original owners. Net result is that I could show the current ownership for that property, and the "master documents" (original owners) of the documents for that property.

Any suggestions on how to write it (keeping in mind that I am self taught and do not know all the tricks!)

Thanks.

 

[workmad3]

I think you need to look at the structure of you tables a bit. You shouldn't need a table for each property, each property should be a record in a table. Once you have that, then you can have a table which can hold the details of the original oweners of a property linked to the property table, along with a table with other owners. The current owner is the most recent person to be in possession of the property, and the original owners are found by looking in the table of original owners.

Hope this helps (If you need any help with table structure, post up what you need for each property here and we will help you sort it out )

 

[jshes]

Linking chains of information

Thanks! I now have a table set up for the following:
Current Owner
Past Owners (which includes the Current Owner, since they may have owned a property in the past and resold it a few times). The next Owner in time is set up to come from the Past Owners Table.
Property and Property description - If a property is split into smaller properties, each individual property is considered a property
Instrument (effective date, recording info and type of conveyance instrument)
If a conveyance has more than one Past Owner conveying into the Next Owner (or vice versa), Should I set up each Owner under that conveyance as a seperate instrument, or can I set the instrument up once, with mutiple Past Owners and Next Owners?

Next I would think that I need to link the "chain" and program (somehow, VBA or otherwise) it to look for the previous owners.How do I do that without linking everyone together manually? I could be wrong in my thinking about it, but it seems to me that an analogy would be like a geneology where you enter everyone's name, and place of birth, children and link them together by last names, taking into account changes in names. The Current Owner would be the kids alive today, the "linking" would look for the name change in a table and then match it to the previous name (marriage) and the birth place would be the property description (since you can only be physically born once, it would be the only unique piece of data). Probably too simplistic.

Thanks for any help.

 

[workmad3]

If you have a table containing all the previous owners of a property, you just get a recordset containing all of them, and you have your history of who has owned the property. Just sort it by the date they pruchased/sold

 

[jshes]

Linking

Thanks, but when I sort by date, even using property as the first step, it gives me more than I need, and I have to manually tract out everything by its components. I think that it is because of the complexity and number of transactions, each transaction contains several elements and people selling, repurchasing and reselling to the same group of people with the same effective dates, and then selling again.

I don't think that I am explaining it very well, so I will try to get a better example to show. Thanks for the help anyway, I'll post again when I get a better example and/or figure out a way to do it!