Wednesday, July 25th, 2012 at 5:01 am by Jason Simanek

Rob Healey and his wife, Michelle in 1998

1969–2012

Rob G. Healey was an energetic and very active member of the Gramps development team since 2007. He passed away on Sunday June 24, 2012.

Rob started contributing to Gramps about the same time I did – sometime during the summer of 2007. As an unemployed web designer at the time, I was working to update the Narrative Web HTML output. Rob was an essential part of testing my latest changes and suggesting and discussing new ideas about how the plugin should work. It was one of my best experiences of contributing to an open source project.

Since then I got a job and my contributions to Gramps have unfortunately become less and less frequent. But Rob had gone on to be a regular contributor, maintaining and updating the Narrative Web plugin as well as the Exif Metadata gramplet.

His ambition and optimism were only exceeded by his kindness.

Most of us knew his health was bad, but not that there was risk of death. He was still committing changes up to two weeks before he died.

 Things the Gramps Devs Have Said About Rob

“I can’t believe it!  I worked with Rob a few years back to get up up-to-speed on gramps and Python.  He was a gentle soul and I’ll miss him.”

“Such sad news – I never had the opportunity to meet Rob but we did chat online now and again. The conversation always came around to something he wanted to do in Gramps but didn’t know how, or where to look … I’ll remember him for his kind nature and determinism to try and do stuff regardless!”

“He was always helpful and enthusiastic about Gramps. It will feel strange without him.”

“The Rob I grew to know: he was very curious, and very kind. I only knew him through Gramps development, but I had many conversations with him about much more. He will be missed.”

“We know that his health declined. Those last days, he was still trying to make the code cleaner, always thinking on the future development.”

Photos and Memories of Rob

Rob’s Facebook wall has become a living memorial. http://www.facebook.com/rob.g.healey?sk=wall