Re: Server going away after a few seconds
Many problems with the table design ...
> GradYear text(12),
Nonsense, should be smallint unsigned.
> Email varchar(25),
Email addresses can be 127 chars long.
> ChangeDate char(12),
Yikes, should be type DateTime or Timestamp
> DeceasedDate char(12),
Should be type Date.
> Obituary varchar(40)
If that's supposed to hold URLs, it's too small.
Slapdash table design like that leads to data errors and poor performance. Take a bit of time to read about relational databases, work through a few web tutorials on the subject, then work through the opening chapters of the MySQL manual.
> 1) Loading Schemas takes about 1 1/2 minutes.
> 2) Loading Tables takes about the same time.
Sounds like a severely underpowered or misconfigured system. Let's start with what version of MySQL are you running, What is the OS, how much RAM is there, what is innodb_buffer_pool_size?