Webinar: The Future is Still in the Past: An Introduction to Online Parish Clerks in the United Kingdom

Guild member, Wayne Shepheard is delivering a webinar on 1st May to Legacy Family Tree Webinars. This is likely to be of interest to those who are researching in England and Wales, and provides an insight into the processes of the Online Parish Clerks and why this voluntary effort is an asset to the genealogical community.

England is divided into 40 administrative counties which traditionally were each comprised of various numbers of ecclesiastical parishes. Each parish had its own church that administered to both the spiritual and the secular needs of the community. In 1538, Thomas Cromwell, chief minister of Henry VIII, issued The Second Henrician Injucntions that mandated every parish to maintain registers in which to record all baptisms, marriages and burials. These documents are central to ancestral research in England but it is not always practical for researchers to inspect or study the original registers or the many additional documents that originated in the parishes. Some of the people offering assistance in sourcing and reviewing the parish information are those involved in the Online Parish Clerk (OPC) program. OPCs are not officially associated with parish councils, ministers or congregations, however, these groups are often helpful in sourcing information about past residents and constructing histories of the various parishes. The tasks of OPCs are primarily to compile reference material for their adopted parish or parishes in the form of transcripts, extracts, abstracts, indexes and copies of original records.

You can listen by registering HERE and, if you have a Legacy subscription download the webinar syllabus. The broadcast will be at 6pm BST, to see when the webinar starts in your timezone, please click the link.

Wayne is a Guild of One-Name Studies members and has registered the surname of Shepheard.