Hats off to you Mike for guessing the underlying requirement that the OP was so reluctant to describe. Seems you guessed correctly. I would nominate you for "Best guesser of the Month".
Congrats!
There are 3 things that are imperative to a perfect database design.
1. Normalization
2. Normalization
and
3. Normalization
If you do not understand the data well enough to classify it you will end up in problems. @I am alive forget what it is and think about what it should be.