Dorset OPC Updates 2012

OPC NEWS

Milestone - I am pleased to announce a major milestone has been reached, over 1.5 million records are now online. Many thanks to everyone who has contributed in the past year to enable us to reach this landmark. It is perhaps quite fitting that we have reached this total with the addition of over 4500 records for Buckland Newton transcribed by Kim Parker who has contributed so much, and this for one of my own parishes (I feel quite quilty that I had not provided these records myself). This donation from Kim represents a huge amount of work, not only transcribing but in this case translating much of the register from the original Latin.

Dorset Windmills - I am delighted to announce a new association for the Dorset OPC, Dorset Windmills. Richard Crumbleholme, OPC for Winterbourne Steepleton, has been researching Dorset Windmills since the late 1980s. His interest started when staying in a small French village with a restored and working windmill. He remembered the old stone windmill towers on Portland near his home and research soon spread to cover the whole of the county. The fourth generation of a Weymouth based family building and building services company but now working as a surveyor, he has wide experience in old buildings which hopefully gives an added dimension to the research. From a technical viewpoint, windmills are very interesting and tend to fly in the face of the wisdom applied to traditional buildings. Other than the Portland mills, all other Dorset windmills now exist in historic records only. The research is listed by Parish and the Dorset OPC is hopefully therefore a natural link with the site. It is hoped that Dorset OPCs will gradually link their own sites to each respective parish windmill. Richard would welcome further information, corrections and perhaps even new windmill sites!

Contacting OPCs - I recently completed a mini-project to update all Parish Pages that have active OPCs to include an improved script for email obfuscation. This is necessary to protect the OPCs from harvesting and associated spam attacks. All email addresses will still be hidden from harvesters, but users who cannot generate mails automatically using the script/link (usually users who use Webmail and do not have a mail program installed on their desktop PCs) will now be able to see the address, usually in the bottom left corner of their browser window. In addition I have now added a basic look up facility on the Contact Page. This will hopefully benefit those users who continue to have difficulty obtaining contact addresses for OPCs directly from the Parish Pages.

New OPCs - Please welcome Sue Thornton-Grimes who is the new OPC for East & West Orchard. I would like to welcome back Sharon Churchill, OPC for Cattistock, Piddletrenthide & Sydling, apologies if you have been having difficulty contacting Sharon, but she is now back and available for OPC enquiries again, with a new email address details on the parish pages and on the Contacts page. Lesley Keatley has volunteered to take on the role of OPC for both Abbotsbury and Symondsbury. A very warm welcome to Lesley. If you are interested in volunteering to be an OPC please refer to the OPC Info page which is linked from the main index

Lost OPCs - Unfortunately a number of OPCs can no longer be contacted using the contact email addresses I inherited in 2009. If these volunteers could contact me (see Contacts Page) I would like to know if they wish to continue with their parishes, if not then I can offer these parishes as vacancies for others to take up. If anyone else has contact details for them please let me know: Sandy Pearcey Powerstock, Julia Chaplin Bloxworth, David Trickett Gussage St Michael, John Hardy Maiden Newton, Jim Gardiner Melbury Osmond and Deborah Carmichael Wambrook & Monkton Wyld

New Parish Pages - Kim Parker has prepared many new parish pages and most have now been uploaded. There is more material to come for many of these parishes contributed by Kim and this will be completed in the coming weeks. Many thanks to Kim for all of the work put in to expand the number of parish pages available on the OPC. Only another 43 parishes now without a parish page - if you wish to provide data on one or more of the remaining parishes feel free to send me details, including photographs if possible. Coming soon: Wimborne St Giles with Wimborne All Hallows.