Can anyone direct me to a resource to open old files saved using CommSoft Roots?

Robert2,141

Can anyone direct me to a resource to open old files saved using CommSoft Roots?

Gordon Collett

I found this article that http://www.sonic.net/~commsoft/rstory.html states:

Family Gathering 1.0 and Ultimate Family Tree

COMMSOFT and Palladium Interactive teamed to launch the next generation of Visual ROOTS. In this partnership, we combined our genealogical and development experience with Palladium's sales and marketing expertise to bring quality family history software to market. 

 In December 1996, COMMSOFT shipped ROOTS V, a full-featured Windows genealogy program. 

Palladium purchased the ROOTS product line in May 1997, and chose the name Ultimate Family Tree for their new product. Palladium assumed technical support for the ROOTS products, which was eventually sold to genealogy.com. Genealogy.com discontinued the ROOTS product line.

That information led to this article: http://www.rootsusers.org/FAQs/FAQ_UFT.html

This does mention a user group that was active in 2019. Maybe you can try to track that down and get the help you need.

Dennis J Yancey

I imagine that it would be important to know what VERSION of ROOTS the files are in.

Do you know?

Dennis J Yancey

in the set of "old files" - are there any files with the ".ged" file extention?

Robert2,141

Thank you for the suggestion regarding the Roots User Group. Unfortunately, I do not know which early versions of Roots were used.

Robert2,141

I don't think there are any files with a .get extension.

Robert2,141

Meant ".ged" extension.

Dennis J Yancey

so I assune you dont have the old application files - just the data files?

(though even if you did hav ethe old application files you couldnt run them on a current operating system)

what year do you think the files were created?

Robert2,141

My mother's estate includes various files saved on 19 floppy disks, with at least some files not being genealogical in nature. All but a few of the floppy files have been transferred to a thumb drive. My mother initially worked with versions of Roots then transitioned to Family Tree Maker, but was not able to move her Roots data to FTM. My mother's estate also included some installation disks for genealogy software, but I don't know which files were saved using any specific software, although a few of the floppy disks have "Roots II" written on them and others indicate FTM (I have recovered the FTM data; the challenge is the older Roots work). What I believe to be the Roots files were last saved in years ranging from 1987 to 2001. The most common file extension was .ovl, but there were also individual files with .bak, .ftb, .inx, .rbd, .cod., .exe and .hlp as file extensions.