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).

When we publish records on the website, the suppression policy of the record owner is applied unless LOPC’s own policy is more restrictive. Records can be suppressed in any or all of the following ways for any register or event type e.g. Baptisms: apply a cut-off period, i.e. do not publish events which took place in the last x years; make the records ‘index-only’, i.e. provide a name-index but no other details for the last x years; or abbreviate the records to suppress sensitive data for the last x years. Currently, LOPC will, as a minimum, suppress age, address, occupation, and cause of death in Burials within the past 25 years; Marriages within the past 50 years; and Baptisms within the past 75 years, and will review suppression of any sensitive material which appears as a margin note.

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: Jul 2026