' dhs, his and your best bet will be to find a used Mac of that vintage on Ebay or a later one running, up to OS X.4 which will run Rosetta emulation of MacOS 9.2. Either of those will run the software that will no longer run on modern Macs. You may then have to find an external USV 3.5 inch floppy drive to read your dad's data. . . and of course a copy of the old software.
In the PC relm, there would be plenty of software to convert those old documents. Why? Because all Apple products are sole sourced from Apple and what Apple does and says goes. Not so with PCs. Sorry for the little jab at Apple. I believe I have the right to complain considering my frustration.
Your assumption that genealogy software came from Apple is totally wrong. . . as is that all Mac software comes from Apple. It doesn't. Apple does not, and has not as far as I know, ever made any genealogy software.
As I've told you before, the fault lay not with Apple but with the publisher of your dad's software. Apple spent a lot of time and money assisting publishers of MacOS software moving their titles over to Apple OS X applications. Some of even the most complex only took two or three weeks worth of effort to do the conversion, and many made what were called "Universal" apps that would run on both platforms for years. Your genealogy publisher elected to do neither, did not take advantage of Apple's free developer program, and abandoned Apple completely. There is where the fault lies.
if your dad was using Family Tree Maker on MacOS9 or earlier, the good news is that Family Tree Maker is still being made and is fully OS X compliant.
Thanks!
The program is called Canvas. Canvas 10 seems to be when Apple abandoned the old formats — quoting my dad. I know nothing about the different Apple programs so I am only quoting my dad. Many of the documents were created in Canvas 5, etc.
A lot of the files on a magnito-optical drive which seems to work with my dads current computers and I was able to read the files.