Thank you for taking the time to help with these problems.

Both your tips are well taken and offer a means of dealing with these problems.

I guess I get frustrated sometimes with the sorts of gyrations we need to go through sometimes to deal with such normal processes. You would think that when the design of a grid object was contemplated, the concept of the CHILD records being indexed on a secondary field would have been considered.

Your way of dealing with this will work fine but it adds complications to modifications made to the child records.
You need to delete the ones from the ACTUAL file and then append the ones from the CURSOR. It can all be done, mind you, but it seems like an overly complicated means of dealing with something that is such a common process.

There may well be a simple means of dealing with this within the VFP GRID properties but I haven't had anyone (including Microsoft) reveal it to me yet.

I resorted to a FILTER on the child records. This works too as long as the number of child records is small.

Thanks again for your input.