I'm not sure how access works and you description is a little ambiguous, so I'll speak from basic tennets.
You want to model a tree structure, so the easiest way to do this is with a single table using a self-referencing foreign key relationship.
In an SQL schema parent records do not reference their children, rather the child records maintain a pointer back to their parents (very apt descriptions in a geneology database). So if I have a departmant table and an employee table I may have:
Code:
Table: Department
id Name
-- ----
1 Engineering
2 Management
Table: Employee
id dept Name
-- ---- ----
1 1 Joe Engineer
2 1 Sue Engineer
3 2 Bob Manager
So, you see that each employee record contaings the id of the department the employee belongs to.
In modeling a tree structure with undetermined depth the schema which lends itself most flexibly is a single table with a foreign key into itself. Let's say for simplicity we're only interested in the father relationship:
Code:
Table: People
id dad Name
-- ---- ----
1 null Great Great Grandpa Joe
2 1 Great Grandpa Mike
3 2 Grandpa Jeff
4 2 Great Uncle Bob
5 2 Great Aunt Thelma
6 3 Dad
7 3 Uncle Pat
8 6 Me
9 6 My Brother
10 7 Cousin Heather
Can you see how that works? Adding a second foreign key for mother is trivial.
Marriages, since with death, divorce and remarriage there can be a many to many relationship, would require a cross-reference table which would contain ancillary information about the union (of souls) such as date of marriage, date of divorce, etc.
