FHACT February Monthly Meeting
14th January 2025
By Engagement Committee

Family History ACT Monthly Meeting: Tuesday 7 February 2025 at 7pm. (In person at the FHACT Education Room, Cook Community Hub, Templeton Street, Cook, or online via Zoom). All welcome. Members and guests interested in attending should register for this event here.
Join us as Rob McDonell, developer of Australian Cemeteries Index, speaks about the website that he developed in 2004 for his father Reg McDonell. ‘My parents took thousands of cemetery photos at hundreds of country NSW cemeteries, and they wanted to make then 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 own photos, so it's now grown to be nationwide, with thousands of contributors.’ The website has a million photos and nearly 3 million inscriptions and it's growing at about a thousand new inscriptions per week.
Rob McDonell trained as an accountant, business analyst and information systems developer. He worked for IBM for 11 years in financial systems, then ran his own business. For the last 23 years Rob has worked for Global Recording Network, a Christian mission that produces audio gospel materials in thousands of languages.