Linking Family Records and Showing Relationships

[Craig_Eley]

Hi Airtable Community,

I have a base that I’m using for personal lifelogging which has three tables: activities (“Dinner with friends”), location (“Sal’s Pizza”) and people, (“Nancy,” “Jonathan,” etc.). Those tables all link to each other.

However, within the “people” table, I want to show relationships: parents, children, siblings, spouses, etc. Unlike when I link to another table, using a linked record here doesn’t seem to auto populate—so choosing one person as another’s spouse does not automatically fill in the other one.

Any suggestions from users or mods out there on how to accomplish what I’m trying to do? Thanks!

[Andy_Lin1]

Because Airtable’s implementation of linking records on the same table isn’t reciprocal, a possible workaround is to use additional Relationship tables. I’ve created an example with Relationships and Families:

Note that this may make data entry a bit more involved than you’re prepared for…

[Craig_Eley]

Thanks, Andy. This doesn’t seem too intensive. I’ll keep experimenting with it.

[Gustavo_Lopez]

You could try to emulate a relational database but will only get you so far. Using 3 tables. The first one is just names of each individual. The second one for “Relationship Definitions” where you label the roles of the left and right columns, for example “Mother-Son”, “Father-Son”, “Manager-Employee”, etc.
On another table for “Links” you would list (via Link field type) the individual on the left, the relation, and the individual on the right.
That way you have a self contained table with each individual and their relation to each other. When you view each individual’s profile, you would see their links to others.

[joeykay]

This is how I would go about it as well. 👍 But with 2 tables. The links and relationship definitions table can be merged into a single "Relationship" table with a field for relationship type holding the types of relationships you want your base to support in a drop down type.