CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am working with a nonprofit organization that already has a decades-old membership database, currently stored in *gasp* Microsoft Access.

As such, all members already have unique ID values.

In importing contacts into CiviCRM, is there any way to import, or preserve, the existing ID values?

This would help greatly when I import the same contacts as members, because then I can match their ID values up.

I can't match them up using email addresses, because many, many of these members (nearly half) do not have email addresses on file!

Any thoughts?  Thanks for any help or guidance you can offer!

Thanks!  External Identifier is the thing!