Designing a census

[Derek]

Though I have used canned databases, this is the first one that I am attempting to design at this level.

I've managed to get Dadabik up and running and only after attempting to enter information, do I realize that I haven't a clue how to continue.

I am setting up a census for genealogy purposes. When I finish entering the first person (the father), I realize that I have no way to add a second person (the mother) without creating a new record.

I had thought that the database would be named census, the tables would be "Tx1850", "Tx1860", "Tx1870" (since each Texas Census year the captured information changed) and that each family would form a record.

Can anyone give me some direction?


Thanks
Derek

 

[Debbie S]

Derek

Please provide more details about what data you have for each family and how you want it to be displayed from the master table.

Debbie
(Latest version of DaDaBIK when this message was posted: 3.1 Beta)

 

[Derek]

Hi Debbie

Typical census type stuff... name, age, place of birth, occupation, religion, etc. The data types aren't a concern. The problem is that if I design it as I believe that I should, when I finish with person number 1, I have no way to add a 2nd, 3rd ... 9th person. An obviously incorrect way would be to look at what would be the most people ever recorded and have a unique field for each persons entry (ie name1, age1 ... name3, age3, etc.) If I had 10 fields and there were a max. of 9 persons, this could result in each record having 90 fields. Obviously a very low tech approach.

Output form would look something like http://quoddy.ca/census-test.html .

Thanks

Derek

 

[Derek]

I don't know how this type of problem is resolved in the real world but it seems that I would need an extra field at the beginning that would indicate how many persons are being enumerated. That allows a computational field into the database and I don't know if thats even allowed.

Another answer could be that every individual in the census would have a record instead of every family. An extra field could be a unique family ID. When I extract data, I could identify the family Id and several records would be retrieved. I could deal with the iteration in HTML. (This also seems low tech but I like it the best so far).

Or maybe even a separate table could be setup that would have family id as the unique field. It would use pointer to other table records used by each family member.

The bottom line is that my strong suit is not database design and I could use the experience of other forum members to identify those solutions that might have hidden problems and suggest solutions that I had not thought of yet.

Derek