What are your origins? Where are you from? These are questions that are common amongst us genie-folk. And when asked, you know that they aren’t looking for the town where you grew up (well, not usually anyway), but rather where do your roots lie.

My origins are mostly English, with a little Irish, a touch of European, and one branch from Finland … all of this heritage is what makes me, ME!!

At our shop at work  (Gould Genealogy & History) we have had a big family tree chart of our family up on display.

I found that coming up with something for the letter “O” of the Family History Through the Alphabet Challenge was a bit of a toughy, but finally found some inspiration, and would like to tell you about one of the websites that I’ve used a lot with my research.

O is for ONLINE PARISH CLERKS
(or OPCs as they’re more commonly known)

Online Parish Clerks are a group of volunteers who transcribe parish records, and make them available online for free. The main Online Parish Clerks website makes the statement that OPCs “… are volunteers who collect genealogical information about a specific parish and answer email enquiries without charge”. Sound too good to be true? Well, it is 100% true.