Family historians often need to import genealogy data. RootsMagic 3 makes this a trivial task, but there are some options of which you may want to take advantage. In this video I take you step-by-step through the process of importing GEDCOM formatted family history data into RootsMagic.
I committed to the old Sierra Online – Generations Family Tree Maker 2250 ancestors ago. I'm running it on a computer limited to Windows 98 SE. What benefits are there to buying a current, unproven, bug-free genealogy program and re-entering that much data? Aside from photos, video and audio linkage.
Yes, it creates GedCom files which are limited to just the basic data.
Hi, Steve.
The benefit that jumps out at me is the preservation of your priceless genealogy work. One day, you will lose the ability to run Windows 98SE and or your copy of FTM. I think you'll want your information to be safely, completely migrated to a current application to help ensure it's maintained (in the best case) and not lost (in the worst case).
If you are looking for a more technical answer instead of that human one, how about this? It sounds like you could use a comparison of the specific features of the version of FTM you're on now with the top PC genealogy applications today (of which the current version of FTM is one of about seven). Unfortunately, that probably doesn't exist, although you could look at a recent feature-by-feature comparison of current software and score your existing software against that.
—Ben