Dear fellow conchlers,
I have recently acquired a marvellous set of drawers from an old collection.
They are already conveniently labelled by superfamily/family. Up to Now my
shells have been stored higgledy-piggledy in boxes all over the place, so I
mean to sort them out and catalogue them properly once and for all. ( New
Year's Resolution for 2001!)
My problem is that I do not have a terribly good memory for all these
complicated branches of each super-family tree, and it is a very slow and
painstaking process when I often have to look up the species name in my
shell books to check which it belongs to.
The trouble is, I have found charts and references which list the family
trees under the heading of the superfamily or family, but there is no
reference list where you can easily look up the (sub)genus and trace it up
to the family/superfamily.... Or is there?
I thought I might make a database for this myself using Excel, but the sheer
volume of data is staggering. Does anyone out there have, or know of, a
comprehensive chart or database which allows alphabetical searching by
(sub)genus to trace classifications upwards?
Most of you are probably so familiar with all these names you don't have any
problem recognising where everything fits, but I am still a novice. I am
learning something nearly every day though, and all these long latin names
are becoming more and more familiar to me.
One other question, which may seem rather silly...
I am always uncertain of the spelling of the (super)family names which end
in "iidae" or "idae" Is there any rule of thumb to know whether there should
be one or two i's? Maybe there is no rhyme or reason, but I can't help
wondering if I'm missing some obvious methodology...

Thanks for your help.
Kindest regards,
Barbara Jouvernaux
RD4 Cambridge 2351
NEW ZEALAND