>select personno, category, level from misshist;
>  where personno + dtoc(fromdate,1) in;
>  (select personno + dtoc(min(fromdate),1) from misshist where category = 'R' group by personno)

>Is there any cleaner way to accomplish this?

That looks pretty clean to me, actually. Another possibility would be a correlated subquery. Without actually testing the code, it would look something like:

SELECT personno, category, level ;
    FROM misshist M1 ;
    WHERE fromdate IN ;
        (SELECT MIN(fromdate) ;
            FROM misshist M2 ;
            WHERE category = "R" ;
              AND m1.personno = m2.personno)

I don't remember offhand if this syntax works before VFP9, and I'm not at my desk to check right now.

Updated update: Since Sergey posted almsot the ssame code a couple of minutes before me, I'll assume it's more-or-less correct. :-)