WordPress architecture for a genealogy-related project

Subject: WordPress architecture for a genealogy-related project

I hope I can use WordPress as an important extension to what I have built already, but I need someone to tell me, at least in very general terms, how I could do that. Or maybe I need to hire someone to specifically help me, but I will try the general approach first. I am an old mainframer, so the concepts are certainly familiar, but my web skills only include reasonable competency in MySQL and PHP and HTML, and not much else.

What I have created is a genealogy database with a unique structure to assist cooperation and to minimize duplication. (Genealogy Registry at http://www.GenReg.com is my beta test site.) This new database system works just fine for the basic genealogical information about people, but the stories and pictures and sources aspect of genealogy is separate. I have crafted a fairly primitive way to do that, but WordPress would add a great deal of polish.

(I see that there are some posts concerning genealogy that contain some interesting information, but I don’t see anything addressing my specific structural question about tying two separate systems together.)

To keep it simple, I need to be able to start at a uniquely numbered name in my genealogy database, and jump straight to a blog page or pages that are tied to that single person. (I also need to be able to jump back, perhaps to move to a different generation within that family, but that is probably not too difficult.) I could have tens of thousands of users and millions of names. I assume I would not actually create the blog page until someone requested it and was ready to enter some data.
I don’t know enough about WordPress to understand how the links back and forth to be handled, or how cumbersome this whole process might be. Any pointers on how one should work through this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Kent Huff

801-798-8441
huffkw@juno.com
http://www.GenReg.com (beta testing)
computer consultant, attorney, author