Boroondara General Cemetery is located in the Melbourne suburb of Kew. It occupies a triangular block of land fronting High Street and Park Hill Road, and is about 31 acres ( 12.545 hectares ) in area. Boroondara is the name of the Parish in which the Cemetery is located, and is an aboriginal word meaning ‘a place of shade.’ The Cemetery was established in 1858 with the first burial taking place on 12 March 1859.
In 1989 a group of volunteers, co-ordinated by Marie Orr of the Port Phillip Pioneers Group Inc., began transcribing the inscriptions on the cemetery headstones and monuments. The names of the volunteers were Pam Dunne, Keith Collyer, Thelma Gladstone, Kathleen Gervasoni, Shirley Grigg, Rene Jarvis, Muriel Newton, Mary Shortall, Molly Sitters and Jeanne & John Whitney. Transcribing was completed in May 1992 and a surname index was compiled by Nancy Roberts. Checking and typing by Dorothy and Loris Samson was completed in January 1993. It was then microfilmed onto a set of 13 microfiche by Nova Micrographical Services and published by Macbeth Genealogical Books of Hampton, Victoria.
In 2012 the Boroondara Cemetery transcriptions were republished on CD together with a more comprehensive index compiled by volunteers from The Genealogical Society of Victoria. This CD contained over 40,000 names indexed from over 14,000 inscriptions from memorials.
In 2015 the data was sold to Ancestry and is now available through them.