FHACT Monthly Meeting (Register)

FHACT February Monthly Meeting is a hybrid meeting. Members and guests interested in attending should register for this event via Zoom or in person. After registering to attend via Zoom, you will receive an email with a link to the external Zoom website to complete the registration.

Topic "Australian Cemeteries Project"

 Presenter Rob McDonell was trained as an accountant, business analyst, and information systems developer. He worked for IBM for 11 years in financial systems. Then, he ran his own business for a while, doing various teaching and contract jobs and computer programming. He developed KChess,a chess program that works particularly well for the blind and visually impaired. For the last 23 years, I've worked for Global Recording Network a Christian mission that produces audio gospel materials in thousands of languages. I lead the Technical Services department and look after the website and database, amongst other things.

He developed the Australian Cemeteries Index website in 2004 for my father, Reg McDonell. Since his passing, he has curated it on a day-to-day basis. He also developed a similar search facility for The Ryerson Index.

His parents took thousands of cemetery photos at hundreds of country NSW cemeteries and wanted to make them available to everyone. The original purpose of the Australian Cemeteries Index was to put them all online and make them easily searchable. Other people then asked if they could contribute their photos, so it's now grown nationwide, with thousands of contributors. It has a million images and nearly 3 million inscriptions. It's growing at about a thousand new inscriptions per week.