I'm want to design a database to store family tree information. I want to be able to capture the Name, DOB, Mother, Father, Date of Death, childern name's and other extra data about the person, military career info, clubs, personal achievements, etc...... I'm kind of stuck on were to start and the table designs for this project. I want something that is very scalable and dynamic.

Here are the entities that I have thought of trying to develop the tables

Person Table:
Person ID,
First Name,
Last Name,
Middle Name,
Date of Birth,
Date of Death

Spouse Cross Reference Table: Link the Person ID to the other Person ID to show they were spouses many to many relationship (since a person can have more than 1 spouse
Spouse CRef ID,
Person ID (f Key to person table)
Spouse ID (Person ID as F key to person table)

Childern Cross Reference Table:
Link the person to there childern, same principle as Spouse cross reference
Childern CRef ID,
Person ID,
Childern ID

Person Information
Person ID,
Category,
Information


I not sure if this will work. I was looking for some help to see if I could come up with a better design and normaliztion of the data needed. Also suggest fields that I may need to make the database more scalable.

Yes, it is has been done, thought through, and implemented before...

Family 0.8.pdf

This is the simplest I know of

If you're a purist, birth and death are also a relationship.

Here's a Model on my Database Answers Site to get you started with Genealogy :-
http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_...logy/index.htm

Barry Williams