If you really want to program in VFP, first of all, the structure: each person would need a unique ID field. Each person would also have two fields for father and mother - pointers to the IDs of the corresponding people.

You could do some things - like adding to a TreeView - without recursion. OTOH, recursion isn't really difficult to implement. Let's suppose you previously wrote functions that call other functions - a reasonable assumption, I think. All you have to do is write a function that calls itself.

* Pseudo-code
FUNCTION AddToTreeView(tnPerson)
  * Command to Add to TreeView goes here
  * Command to Put all direct descendants into a cursor goes here
  * Condition for query: mother = tnPerson or father = tnPerson
  scan
    AddToTreeView(tnPerson)
  endscan

Each recursive function needs a way to "end" (not recurse further), at the lowest level, to avoid infinite recursion. In this case, if no descendants are selected, the SCAN will automatically process zero records; therefore, this condition is satisfied.

>>Does anyone know of an algorithm in VFP to process/traverse a genealogy tree? I know it will take recursion, but I've not done that before. For example, for my great grandfather, I want to make a treeview of all his children, grand-children, great.... etc. Also, in a database which contains this data, including the children's birth dates, I need to do some processing for each parent and their children to build an age & mortality tree. Any ideas or pointing to resources for this type of thing would be helpful.
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>>Thanks
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>Mark, make it easy on yourself. Go to www.familysearch.org and download Personal Ancestral File. It's free. You can also download GEDCOM files from there and import them.