On Wed, 3 Feb 2010 10:17:42 -0500, "Nan" wrote:

John,
Thank you for your reply. I think I understand. Do I have this right?

The main contact information would go in a Household table with a unique ID.
This would be a contact responsible for payment and care of the student if a
minor with mailing info.

Student name would go in the student table with the householdID as a foreign
key. If an adult is a student, their name would be entered again with a
link to the household table as the responsible contact. In the future, this
would enable a child of an adult student who is already in the household
table to easily be linked back to a household main contact.

I hope this makes sense, I'm typing as I think it through.

Sounds good to me! I have a church membership database which uses the same
paradigm: a Families table with address information and a "FamilyName" field
for addessing letters to the family as a whole ("Mike & Debbie Schmidt"),
linked one to many to a Members table with firstname, lastname and other
biographical data fields. It works fine and is a good analogy to what you're
doing.
--

John W. Vinson [MVP]