Thanks for weighing in. My concern is just that if I create a "master" record in "people" and use their "real name" in that table, what's to prevent that name being duplicated in the "names" table? etc. The suggestion to eliminate names completely from the "people" table solves that issue, but yeah, that would make it more difficult to manage that table and see who's who on a day to day basis--at least for the likes of me! 🙂