About the Kent OPC Project and this Web Site
Who we are
We are a worldwide group of volunteers who work to provide FREE GENEALOGICAL AND HISTORICAL DATA AND INFORMATION about a parish and its people, to assist family historians. At no time, now, or in the past has the Kent OPC required payment of any nature or kind whatsoever in exchange for providing its data and collections to our readers. We are finding, though, that in many cases people have approached us to offer donations of goods and, sometimes, in lieu of goods, funds with which to purchase transcribeable material. These donations have included situations whereby an individual had no time to transcribe material for a particular parish, nor wished to take on the roll of an OPC or casual contributor but was quite willing, for a nomimal donation, to sponsor one particular parish so that we could purchase the records for transcription. What resulted from that joint endeavour was the very full and almost complete transcription of parish registers and census for that particular parish - a wonderful resource for future researchers of that parish.
How this Site Works
There are two separate navigation menus to use in finding your way around our web site. One is located in the top header along the very bottom line of that header, which contains static links to the Home page, the Parish List, the Kent Family Garden, Volunteer, Donations & Gifts, Forum (not yet up and running), Contact Us and Acknowledgments pages. These links will not change. The second navigation menu is located along the left side of each of the main web pages and may change over time. This left-hand navigation pain does not appear on the Parish parishes nor any pages attached to those parish pages. A modified version of this navigation menu is found in the Kent Family Garden and contains links specific to that area of our web site. Each navigation menu contains links to separate pages on this website, into many of which other web pages and web sites have been linked. The sub-pages, in turn, contain transcripts, extracts, abstracts and indices of many Kent records.
For example, to locate what information is available for a particular parish, click on the link in the top menu bar that reads "Parish List". On the Parish List, either click on an alphabetical letter across the top of the white window of that page or read down the page to find the parish in which you are interested. If the parish name is in blue then pages have been established for that parish. Clicking on the parish name will trigger that particular parish page to open. Once on the individual parish page, you will learn if an OPC is available for that parish and also find links to records, photographs, news, and families associated with that parish.
Every page in this web site has a link to the Home page. So, if you wish to change to another area of this web site but cannot find a direct link to a resource you wish to view, return to the Home page and retrace your steps from there. The parish pages, as well as any pages associated with a parish, have links back to the main Parish List as well as back to the home page of the parish. NOTE: At the time of a shift of our web host from Montreal to Vancouver we lost some functionality on our site. Many of the parish pages have link buttons to the home page that are now outdated. We are working to correct this situation. In the meantime, please use www.kent-opc.org/index.html to return to the home page
The founding of the OPC scheme
The original Online Parish Clerk project was that established for the county of Cornwall. During 2000 three gentlemen residing in Cornwall - Michael McCormick, David Stick and Paul Brewer - envisioned and formulated the concept and structure of the Online Parish Clerk project. In January, 2001 the men launched their vision with an announcement of the project to the Cornish mailing lists on Rootsweb. This also marked the first request for volunteers to assist as assigned parish clerks. The concept was generally well-received and list members from around the world signed on as volunteers to the Cornwall OPC project. Since those early beginnings a number of OPC projects have been formulated: Dorset, Devon, Wiltshire, Warwickshire, Lancashire, Sussex, Cumberland and Westmorland. The Kent OPC project was initiated during 2004 by Adrian Furminger and taken over as of 24 December, 2006 by the current administrator, Susan D. Young. It is believed that an OPC project is now in the works for London.
Regardless of county, all OPC projects share a core foundation:
Collect - obtain and collect as many records for a chose parish as is possible.
Preserve - historical and genealogical information found in the many records by way of transcription and storage of that information either online or in other electronic or digital formats.
Share - the gathered information with all personal and private researchers by making it freely available either online or by way of written lookup requests. Readers and patrons visiting an OPC project are encouraged also to become involved by donating a little of their time to assist with the extraction of relevant data that can be published to a county project.
Flexibility - each OPC is the one who decides what data he or she wishes to collect for a parish, how it will be organized and distributed.
Respect - each OPC is required to consider possible copyright, data protection and privacy issues in the transcription and dissemination of the gathered information in their care and control. Each OPC also must be alert to and discourage the misuse or commercial use of the information within their care and control. All transcriptions are the copyright of the individual who produced them; they are made available freely to private family researchers at the courtesy of the transcriber and we ask our readers and patrons to also respect the copyrights of our contributors.
How the Kent OPC operates
Our volunteers can choose to adopt a parish for which they are ultimately responsible for the routine collection and transcription of original record sources whether directly or through one or more assistants. A volunteer who has adopted a parish is known by the title of Online Parish Clerk but our volunteer should in no manner be confused with an official Parish Clerk appointed by a County Council. Some of our volunteers are unable to act in the capacity of an OPC and choose, instead, to simply provide transcriptions or other reference works from time-to-time. These volunteers are known as casual contributors.
All of the reference material made available under the umbrella of the Kent OPC project is free to use for personal and private purposes only. None of the data that is available under the Kent OPC project umbrella may be reproduced for any commercial purposes. Researchers are also reminded that all information provided by way of the Kent OPC project, regardless of the avenue of its delivery, is, at best, a secondary source and should be treated and regarded as such - as a means to developing a potential line of ancestry or enquiry only. Original documents should always be checked before one incorporates information from a secondary source into their genealogical data. No warranty is implied or given concerning the accuracy of the data delivered via the Kent OPC project.
Ideally, there should be an OPC for every parish in Kent. Some OPCs may choose to service one or more parishes. However, in practical terms, with over 400 parishes in the county, the Kent OPC project is far short of the number of volunteers needed to cover all of the parishes. This situation does not necessarily mean that there is no information for a parish that has no OPC. Quite often, we receive donations of transcribed records from casual contributors. So, it may well be that a parish in which you are interested does have some information available to you. At the very least, every posted parish page contains an historical description of the parish providing statistics of population, number of houses, churches in the parish and the names of any significant landholders, if available. The parish page also includes links to outside sources of free information such as the 1881 census available on www.familysearch.org . When a parish has an OPC, the parish page records the name and contact details of its OPC. All posted parish pages can be accessed via our Parish List page.
Due to the organization of the Kent OPC, the reference works are made available to our readers and patrons via one or more avenues. Some of the reference material is published on this Kent OPC web site. Other materials have been posted to personal web sites of individual OPCs. In either case, the data is accessed by way of links on the relevant parish page posted on this web site. Links have also been made, in many cases, to independent transcriptions and/or data residing on web sites and the property of individuals who are in no manner connected with the Kent OPC. So, it may well be that you will visit a page on one particular day, return to that same page a few days later and not be able to access the independent material. When we are made aware of the loss of data through such eventualities we make every effort to contact the original data owner to request his/her permission to re-post the data on the Kent OPC web site. We have been successful in reviving many of the smaller independent sites through this means with specific licenses from the web site holders for the use and display of their material.
Alternatively, material may be made available by a parish OPC by way of a lookup service only. This may be the case particularly if an OPC has a source that is in the form of a published work such as a book, newspaper report and/or magazine or journal article. If a lookup in a particular work is available, a notation of the sources available for lookup is included on the relevant parish page under the section titled "A View of the Parish" directly following the name and contact information of the parish OPC. If an OPC is providing a lookup service it has been left to the individual OPC to determine if an email-enquiry or postal-enquiry service works best for him or her. Again, information concerning the services available from an OPC and his or her preferred method of enquiry is posted on the relevant parish page. When contacting an OPC please allow two to three weeks for a reply. If you haven't received a reply after three weeks please send an email to me at administrator@kent-opc.org.
A little bit of the history of the Kent OPC
The Kent OPC project had been undertaken first by Adrian Furminger and it is to him that we all owe a great thanks in getting this OPC project off the ground. He began the site during 2004 but found that by late 2006 the demands of maintaining and developing this site were great and conflicted with his already very busy and demanding professional career. With resolve he offered the administration and future development of the project and the web site to the general public via the Rootsweb Kent mailing list. After careful thought and stock-taking of my skills, abilities, and the fit of this project with my professional career, I wrote to Adrian and volunteered to take over the management and development of this project.
At the commencement of my involvement with the Kent OPC project during December, 2006, a new webpage design was implemented. With the advancement in web coding, and the additional utilities afforded by our switch of hosting company to a Montreal firm during December of 2008, a re-design of the site with a content management system ("CMS") was instituted. Unfortunately, constant successful hacking of that web site eventually lead to the move of the Kent Online Parish Clerk's web site to yet another new web host based in British Columbia - on the other side of Canada. Unfortunately, the content management system did not transfer properly from the old host so until I can clear the time to develop a fresh installation of that system I have reverted this site back to its previous incarnation from October 2008. Please bear with me while all of the design developments are put in place.
We hope you find your travels through this project beneficial to your research. If you feel you would also like to contribute to the efforts of this project, please send an email to me at the above address. Also please visit our page for volunteers and for donations for further information.
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