My suggestion would be to have "relationship" tables (such as person
relationship or family relationships) which would have the "joins" i.e.
personID, Relationship, RelativeID
25	Mother	35
35	son	25

From this we know person 25 in the tbl_people is the mother of person 35 and
35 is the son.  You can then define a 1 to many relationship from tbl_people
to this table.  You can also define family entities.  

You could also have columns such as "mother" "father" with pointers back to
the table (i.e. entry 35 would have a 25 in mother column) but multiparents
get messy where it would simply be another record with the intersection
table.

Good luck. I hope that helps.

Brian Freeman
(xxx) xxx-xxxx  ext. 415
Carnegie Technologies/Bluewave Computing 
www.carnegie.com and www.bluewave-computing.com

-----Original Message-----
From: jcass@t... [mailto:jcass@t...]
Sent: Monday, December 30, 2002 6:02 PM
To: sql language
Subject: [sql_language] Multiple Self Joins?????


I am designing a genealogy DB using Access and ASP. The code for Access is 
almost like SQL Server; I can translate. This is an SQL only problem, 
hence  posting to this message group.
I have a tblPeople, each record being a Person. It is easy to normalize 
the unique values, but I do not know where to begin on the Relatives 
(Mother, Father, Siblings, Spouses, Children of each Spouse) because each 
Relative is also another Person record in the DB, hence, 0 to many self 
joins. Is this even possible? Does anybody have any ideas?????
Thanks!
Jim Cassilly
jcass@t...