several pointers to records in one field

Hello, I started to use PHP with MySQL last december. Personal use: list of inhabitants of a town in the 15th century Problem is the following: one person has an arbitrary number of children. It is heavy to have fields child1,child2,child3,...,childn containing the row number of each child especially if the number of children is variable. When I played with Commodore VIC20 I used to put pointers to records in a string in the form pointer1,pointer2,...,pointern in a string. I think of using explode and implode to put all the record numbers of the children in one varchar field. If someone have a better idea? -- Alain Barthélemy cassandre@bartydeux.be http://bartydeux.be