singhals wrote: > > WHY would I want to keep them separate once I've decided they're the > same person? My bc, my mc, and my son's bc all refer to ME as ME; what > would be the POINT of keeping ME in there 3 times? This is the crux of the problem. Your certs all have a /name/ on them. Those or just that, names. The names are not /you/. They point to you but they are an entirely different type of entity (or object or thing or whatever term you wish to use) in reality and therefore really should be represented by different types of entity in a database. So you don't have /you/ in there three times, you have /you/ in there once, each of the /names/ from the three certs in there once each and three /links/ between the names and you. Now you might think this is overkill because the names are all the same (assuming the name on your son's bc is your maiden name because if not you have two variants there already). But if so this is just one possibility. At the other extreme I have an ancestor whose surname was, in the current dominant spelling hereabouts, Dearnley but in the past varied quite a bit and whose first name was rendered so variably that I have no idea what it was supposed to be as it goes from Hammond to Amon and most points in between. So it makes a lot of sense to have a single point where you can standardise the name and link all the variants to it. It also makes a lot of sense to be able to attach some sort of epithet to disambiguate people of the same name such as my run of 4 William Goddards. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk