In case anyone else wishes to follow this saga, an update on how it was successfully achieved.

Step 1 - create a new Serendipity blog to receive the old simplePHPblog entries
Step 2 - create all the users and categories to be used for the new blog entries, and a dummy single entry in each category ...

Many thanks Ian for your kind guidance - I'll look into each of your suggestions and see which looks easiest

The 'via Wordpress' if it can handle the import already sounds good, so I'll look there first.

Again, thanks for your swift and helpful reply, appreciated.
-J-

Hello! (by the way - Happy New Year of 2014 :mrgreen:)

I am trying to migrate away from an ancient version of a plain-text file based blog (SimplePHPblog) -- into the nice shiny new Serendipity blog.

So, I have all these static-format coded plain-text files, one per blog entry, spanning 7 years of ...