[AccessD] IFF else problem

KathrynAtGwens kathrynatgwens at socal.rr.com
Mon Aug 16 14:43:25 CDT 2004


Patti said:
> Personally, I would have set up the database as FirstName, MaidenName,
> Surname
> So that Surname is always the last name used.

Not neccessarily in genealogy (this is a tombstone database, by the way). Say there are 5 siblings
Kathryn (Doe) Smith
Karen (Doe) Jones
Kay Doe - unmarried
Kerry Doe - unmarried
Kenneth Doe - married

I wouldn't be able to sort them under Doe if I had had Doe in Surname for the males and under MaidenName for the females. To make it more clear, maybe I could have used BirthSurname instead of Surname. The other way I'd have to do it, would be that for the males, I'd have to have Doe in both the Surname and MarrName fields, and rely on the Female field in all queries.

But most of my queries, I'm sorting only by Surname (BirthSurname) as, in genealogy, that is the way that women are thought of. They might have 5 married names in their lifetime, but since this is for burials, there is only one used at death.

Now, in a proper genealogy program, that would be different. In The Master Genealogist (by http://whollygenes.com) the birthsurname is the primary name (called Name-Var but marked at primary), but they can have all kinds of alternate names - like Name-Nick and Name-Mar. And the program can sort with *just* the primary names in the list, or can include all of the names.

FYI
The purpose of my database is to keep track of tombstone status. I have y/n fields called
Photo
Scanned
NotAvailable
NeedPhoto
TMGlinked
WebLinked
The first is whether or not I *have* a photo of the tombstone.
The second is whether or not I've scanned it
Third and fourth are obvious - and the longer ago the person died, the more likely it is unavailable.
TMGlinked means that I've linked the photo in the genealogy program and lastly,
WebLinked means I've linked the photo on the web. Here's an example page:
http://babcockancestry.com/BuryPagesLaura/BuryingPlacesWI.shtml

Edwin Snow has a tombstone picture and has first two and last two fields checked.
Augusta (Priebe) Snow has a checkmark in NotAvailable.

Normally, I don't need the married name while using this database as all women are thought of by their birthnames. However, for a report I'm preparing for Gwen's trip, I wanted a list of the people for whom NeedPhoto is checked, so that as she goes through various states, she can see whether a tombstone is available. In that case, when she gets to the cemetery she's going to be looking for Kathryn Smith and Karen Jones, not Kathryn and Karen Doe. But the maiden name is important too, as they may be buried near her parents as often as near his. Hence Kathryn (Doe) Smith and Karen (Doe) Jones in the report.

Works pretty well for me on the whole. As you see on the web pages, we have a lot of photos of tombstones 212 of them, 22 unavailable, 72 needed (though some may move to unavailable status), and about 500 more that fall into several categories. Some we haven't yet dug through to get the photo out of trip albums, *many* we don't have the cemetery location, so they are moot, many are old enough they will probably end up in the unavailable field. Tons of those are in Massachusetts:
http://babcockancestry.com/BuryPagesGNG/BurialsMA2.shtml

I used to have a separate database of the people on that page, and I publicly thank Drew for the off list help he gave me in combining the two databases.

--
Kathryn Bassett (at work address)
kathrynatgwens at socal.rr.com
kathryn at bassett.net (home) 




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