Data entry and Dropdowns

With the risk of asking something redundant:

I am setting up a database where there is a parent and a child table, with a many to one relation.
The parent contains salts, the child table is a dictionary of common names and SMILES elements.

When entering or editing data in the child table, i would like to see a dropdown or something similar so that i can choose the parent, instead of remembering the index.

As this does sound a tad obvious i am afraid i am missing something rather obvious here...

Currently selecting the index is the only option.

It would be certainly better to be able to define a human readable field name instead of this, and this is in the plans, but for now its not possible.

Tim