A Basic History Table - Foreign Keys And Deletes

Let's say you have a Users table, which simply contains a collection of people. Each person has attributes like their password, first and last name, username, etc. It would be useful to track changes to that table over time, so that if an entry is changed, you can simply look at a history table and see which changes occured, and when.

An INSERT/UPDATE trigger works well for this sort of thing, where the trigger inserts all of the 'INSERTED' values into a history table that has basically the same table definition as the Users table. But it gets tricky when considering Deletes.

If my History table entries reference back to the User in the Users table, this means that if I ever want to delete the user, I need to delete all their History first. This means I can't keep records of user deletions, which is significant. The other approach is not to have a foreign key reference in the History table, so that if a user is deleted, I can still keep my History about that user. Including deletes.

I have been timid about doing it this way, since I felt it broke the idea of a well structured database. Is there a better way to approach this? Is there a standard way to set up triggered history to track changes, including deletions, from a table?

Thanks,
-Dan