OnLine Parish Clerks for the County of -- Lancashire --

Data Privacy Policy

This policy aims not only to comply with UK Law, but also to reflect the policy and wishes of the owners of the records we present. It also aims to achieve a balance between the interests of living individuals and those of the researchers who use our website.

The LOPC website presents transcriptions of records dating from the sixteenth century to the present day. Where these records refer to living individuals, the lawful basis for processing is “Legitimate Interests”.

Our policy was originally developed in 2011, in consultation with the Data Commissioner’s office and is reviewed each year. Where changes are proposed, a revised version is circulated to all members of the coordination team for comment and approval.

The records presented on our site are in general publicly viewable, at Record Offices, Libraries, and/or online via other websites; or they may be available to the public in other ways e.g. by an individual making a request to an Incumbent to view the parish registers. In most of these cases, the source material can be viewed in its entirety as a source document, or as an image of it. LOPC does not present source documents on its website, but only a transcription (index) derived from them. Thus, the material we present is generally in the public domain already.

Sources of material are shown in the transcriptions on our website. For modern registers (i.e. those which may refer to living individuals), we normally work from photographic images of the original registers, taken by LOPC or others with the permission of the record owner. These images are kept on a secure private server which is run by LOPC itself. Access to the images is subject to strict access control and is only available to authorised persons within the LOPC team. Where images are required by others in the team, a suitable secure transfer method is used (e.g. Dropbox).

LOPC’s system which prepares records for the website is flexible and is designed to allow any register to be suppressed in full or in part if requested by the record owner (e.g. the Incumbent of the Church, for Parish Records). Unless the record owner requests otherwise, we normally publish in full: Burials which took place more than 25 years ago; Marriages which took place more than 50 years ago; Baptisms which took place more than 75 years ago. For more recent events than these, we suppress age, address, occupation, and cause of death. If sensitive material appears as a margin note we will review the need to suppress it also. A record owner may ask us to restrict this further. We can do this in any or all of the following ways for any register or set of registers: apply a longer cut-off period, i.e. do not publish events which took place in the last x years; make the records ‘index-only’, i.e. provide a name-index but no other details for the last x years; or suppress sensitive data for longer than the standard period, for the last x years.

Additionally, an individual (or parent or guardian, in the case of a child) may write to request us to withdraw a record which refers to them, or to correct information which has been incorrectly transcribed. If the source register was incorrect, we may add a note. All such requests will be addressed within one month of an e-mail being received by a coordinator.

Where records have been made available to us, we normally transcribe them in full and make a copy of that transcription available to the record owner and/or the Record Office. The suppression policy above relates only to the publication of those records on our website.

Last reviewed: May 2023