Thank you gentlemen! Sometimes the best answer is staring you (or me)
right in the face. I already have the "TerminationDate" in the
membership table so I can use that to show whether they are active/inactive.

And yes, Jeff, the "and more" includes foreign keys for both the
FamilyID and the IndividualID. Thanks for checking though. As I said,
sometimes it's the simplest things that I miss.

Kathy R.

Kathy R. wrote:
I am creating a membership database for a church. Individual
information is in three basic tables:

tblFamily
FamLastName (for entire family)
Address

tblIndividual
FirstName
MiddleName
LastName (takes care of hyphenated married names, or different names for
children, etc.)
BirthDate
MarriageDate

tblMembership
JoinDate
JoinManner
TerminationDate
TerminationManner
and more...

Once a person leaves the membership of the church I need to "archive"
the information. It needs to be kept for our permanent records. What
is the best way to do this? My two thoughts would be:

1) set up duplicate tables and move the "archive" information to it

or

2) Create an active/not active field in the tblIndividual and keep all
the information, both active and archived in the original set of tables.

Is one way or the other better or more efficient? Is there some other
way that I haven't thought of that would work better?

Thank you for your help and input!

Kathy R.