Finding Your Ancestors In County Durham, England

This is a fairly narrowly-focused site but there's a lot here. If you're have ancestors in County Durham, England, and you want to do research on them, check out Durham Records Online at http://www.durhamrecordsonline.com .

This site has several genealogical resources focused on County Durham, including transcriptions of the 1841 through 1891 census for a large part of County Durham, transcriptions from parish registers, and an index. Searching is free but viewing records does have a fhee associated with it.

There are several ways by which you may search, including given name, surname, parent name, year (of birth, death, or some other event), and head of household name.

I did a general last name search for Cooper. I got over 2400 results. Yikes. For search results you'll get a table showing the ID number of the record, forename, surname, age/year, and what district it was in. There are no links to anything unless you log in. If you do log in the search results will have one extra column to the right, a link to allow you to view a record. Viewing records seems to always cost one credit.

I took a look at a couple of records. These are not scans but transcriptions. A nice touch is that Durham Records Online also immediately e-mails you the record as well, so you don't have to worry about keeping the page. The amount of information you get varies depending on what kind of record you're looking at; Baptisms, for example, show Parish/Church, date of baptism and child's name with parent's name. The record from the 1871 census I looked at included entire families with name, occupation, birthplace, age, and relationship to head of household.

Credits start at £5 for 4 records (£1.25 per record, natch) and get less expensive the more you buy, all the way down to £25 for 26 records (96p per record.)

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