Online Parish Clerks (OPC)
Many sites such as the one run by Ian Sage have come together over the past several years under an organizational scheme known as Online Parish Clerks, or OPCs. Although the name seems to imply otherwise, these individuals are not employees of the respective parishes, nor are they aligned to the parish councils. They are just family historians like you and me who have volunteered to collect and share information about the history of their parish of interest, as well as disseminate information from available records. Most OPCs choose to do this by providing historical parish information and record transcriptions online (either on the County OPC site or their own personal site), but some volunteer to answer questions or provide lookups via email instead. Most OPCs concentrate on parish registers of baptisms, marriages, banns and burials, but anything that the volunteer feels that researchers may find interesting is fair game, so you'll also sometimes find census returns, churchwarden accounts, land tax records, wills, bastardy bonds and other such records.
The Online Parish Clerk scheme began with Cornwall in January 2001, but has since spread (especially during the past year) to cover almost a dozen counties:
- Cornwall
- Devon
- Dorset
- Essex
- Hampshire
- Kent
- Lancashire
- Leicestershire
- Somerset
- Sussex
- Warwickshire
- Wiltshire
OPC schemes are rumored to be in the works for Cambridgeshire, Surrey & North & West Ridings of Yorkshire.
Each county OPC group is operated independently, much like the GenWeb project. The emphasis is on free sharing of parish information. Each OPC decides what data to collect and how it will be organized and presented. OPCs are encouraged, but not required, to also contribute their transcribed data to other Internet sites such as FreeReg and FreeCEN. A national OPC site also exists to provide a central place for information on the Online Parish Clerk scheme, as well as links to participating counties.
Comments
There is along history of Pascoes near Belleville, Ontario, Canada. In whats called Tyendinaga township.
Regards
Terry
It appears I would need to know the parish and church of my ancestor to find anything. To be sure,I put in the optional search box the last name of Pascoe and nothing was found. So it seems just the ancestor last name will not find information. If one has that info though, this looks like it would be a great site!
This sounds like something I wish we had here for the U.S. parishes to look up on our own, online.
Transcriptions are a great help; but it is still a good idea to go to the original record via film from the FHL. On the Dorset page “February” was spelled incorrectly. Small thing, yes: but such errors always make me wonder how careful the rest of the work has been. I always check original records once I know I have the right location. My husband also has PASCOEs. Variation is PASCO; and it’s a very common Cornwall name. I have read the records for these families in Fowey, parish of St. Ewe.
I ‘work’ as a volunteer Online Parish Clerk and would like to respond to Emily’s point about the spelling.
We transcribe exactly what we see; if a word is spelled incorrectly, then that is probably because it is spelled like that in the original. Some of the words that I transcribe I know are ‘wrong - Emily might like to know that in the early 1800s, her name is often spelled ‘Emery’. If that is what it says in the records, I cannot in all honesty correct the spelling to what I think it is. After all, some girl somewhere may well have been called Emery - although I doubt it.
Standards of literacy in the past were not perfect. Spellings change through time. But please don’t criticise the work of volunteers who usually do this is their free time and have full time jobs to do as well.
You message, Emily, made me feel like not bothering to do any more transcribing.
Emily obviously hasn’t given her time freely to assist others in this very worthwhile way, as when you read through the initial start up stuff it is clear you must transcribe what you see, not what you think.
Don’t be put off - your hard work is very much appreciated!