At 10:18 AM 11/23/2017, Blah BlahBlah wrote: > Well, it's off-topic, but does anyone know what kind of database >and/or programs institutions like Ancestry or FamilySearch use to >manage the billions of names found in millions of records? I don't use those services, so I'm not familiar with how much data they track per person. Basic Name/BMDB/father/mother information doesn't require much (the only complication would be multiple marriages; and that's only because I think in TMG/UFT "marriage is an event" rather than most software where "marriage is a family") -- almost a single table would suffice. In "marriage is a family", the key data item is the "family" based on a pair of people A three generation web page (parents -> focus person/family -> children) is rather simple -- and last time I did have access to one of these web sites, that was about all one could see at a time. Following a chain of descent meant changing the focus and regenerating the web page. Pseudo-SQL Family(_ID_, title, spouse1ID, spouse2ID, date of marriage) Individual(_ID_, name, date of birth, date of death, date of burial, parentfamilyID) {expand "date of X" to include any other details for that event} select c.ID, c.name, s1.ID, s1.name, s1.DoB, ... , s2.ID, s2.name, s2.DoB, ... from Family join Individual as s1 on Family.spouse1ID = s1.ID join Individual as s2 on Family.spouse2ID = s2.ID join Individual as c on Family.ID = c.parentfamilyID where Family.ID = {focusfamilyID} gets child names and information for the "family"; getting the parents of the "family" would be another small SQL (or two -- spouse 1 and spouse 2) using the focus family to get the s1/s2 parentfamilyIDs, then following the new family spouseXID to get the names. -- [email protected] Dennis Lee Bieber HTTP://home.earthlink.net/~bieber.genealogy/