|
25 Years of Programming
An open source source for C, C++, OWL, BASIC, MDB, XLS, DOT, and more... |
Home Projects Up Sitemap Search Blog Forum+Chat About Us Privacy Terms of Use Feedback FAQ Images Services Payments Humor Music |
Family History Genealogy Microsoft Access DatabaseFAMHIST.MDB is a genealogy (family history or family tree) database that stores information about your ancestors and the relationships among them. It has a Form (screeenshots below) where you can click buttons to navigate up and down generations and from one side of the family to the other, editing entries as you go. For dates, the day, month, and year are kept separate to allow for the common situation where you only know part of a date. Its tables are: People - information about each person:
Marriages - this table links two people from the People table to create a marriage:
Downloads:There is sample data in the database to use for experimenting. To delete the sample data before entering your own:
Related project:The Microsoft Excel personal history calendar / diary project could be used to store and lay out descriptions of significant events for people in your family tree. ScreenshotsThe BrowsePeople form is easy to use but complex in its design, and has some examples of Access Basic (Access 2.0) / Visual Basic code. It uses (and therefore provides examples of how to use): source queries, subforms, buttons that launch subroutines, and calculated fields that use domain lookup and other functions. The most recent version (2010) has been modified to use an Arial 10 font instead of the less readable MS Sans Serif 8 shown in these screenshots. The "Search .DOC" button does not do anything, in either the free or paid versions. I left it in the form so you can rename and reprogram it to do something useful, if you wish.
The same form in Design View:
Notes on the family history databaseMacros disabledDepending on the Microsoft Office macro security settings you use (I always recommend high security), when you open the database, you might get these warnings. The links give explanations:
Using the databaseBrowse the database with the BrowsePeople form. It displays one record (a person) with their parents, spouse or spouses, and children shown, with buttons that allow you to navigate to any of the parents, spouses, and children you choose. Entering dataData entry is most easily done through the forms. The entry procedure is not very well automated, and it would be difficult to automate it because of the interdependencies among the records in the database. It is easiest to begin entry with the earliest generation and work forward to the present time. This is because two of the fields you enter for a person are the parents, and it's easiest if they are already in the database. Procedure to enter a person:
The AutoExec macro, if you enable it, will open both the BrowsePeople and EditMarriages forms on startup because you'll be switching between them frequently. Reasons for the .MDB formatA database format is the only one flexible enough to accommodate new facts. In spite of their apparent desirability for presentation or other purposes, I've rejected all of the following alternative formats because although they would look great, adding a new person or new information would require readjusting the entire document:
One advantage of a database format is that it lends itself to distributed access and editing through something like Windows Sharepoint services, so it could be stored in a central location like a website and everyone in a family could edit it on the internet. It should be possible to use the MDB to create (with some difficulty) any of the other formats, a process that would not work in reverse. Creating a lineage chart or family treeNo method is easy, and the final step is always a graphic design and layout problem.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Copyright ©2011 Steven Whitney. Last modified Fri 01/28/2011 01:06:48 -0800. |
||