Organization of Data
The original organization of data has been the most difficult part of this process to grasp. There's no way I could have anticipated what this process would have looked like ahead of time, and its been an interesting back-and-forth experimentation.
Dates
- Birth Day Day
- Birth Day Month
- Birth Day Year
- Death Day Day
- Death Day Month
- Death Day Year
I needed to separate out each individual field for the dates, but I quickly realized there would also be times when I'd want a full date (Birthdate, Deathdate) - or times when I'd just want a span of years (Birth To Death). For this I'd need to create a calculation field to express different ways of reading the same data.
Names
- First Name
- Middle Name
- Last Name
- Suffix
- Nickname
Similar with names: I realized I also was going to need just one field that was the "Full Name" so I was going to need to create a calculation field to add these fields together.
Through the process of entering in everyone's names, I've also now realized I should probably add a "Prefix" field, for the people who use one (Reverend, Colonel, etc.).
I'll talk more about the Calculation Fields in the Manipulation of Data section.
Relationships
The most difficult part of File Maker Pro to conceptualize was the way everything was connected on the back end.
The above picture demonstrates how the basic information is related. In a way its a much simpler system than I'd originally envisioned. The essential information is:
WHO are the people (most information is contained with each individual record)
HOW are the people RELATED? (this is the next most time consuming data to input)
WHERE do they live? (This is the part of the data that I'm still working on. For now its really mostly about the people and how they're related.