Explore the archive collections at Durham Record Office using the main catalogue. Four additional online indexes help you to access our most popular family history and mining collections. You can also use our interactive mapping to view historic Ordnance Survey maps and aerial photos of County Durham.
Online catalogue
We have a detailed online catalogue which allows you to search our archive collections from home.
This contains all published catalogues and images from our archive collections. Currently there are over 6,000 catalogues covering half a million collection items and almost 50,000 images online. More than 34,000 of these images are from the Durham Light Infantry archives; the rest are mainly topographical photos.
The catalogue includes the Record Office reference library and several useful indexes.
Search the catalogue
Indexes
In addition to the main catalogue there are four indexes to help you find your way around the most popular collections. There are two complementary indexes relating to places and parish registers, a key source for family history research, and two indexes covering Durham collieries and the miners who worked in the Durham coalfield.
Search place names
This is an index of County Durham place names with links to the corresponding Church of England parishes at any given time.
Search Place Names
Search Church Registers
This index gives you detailed information about the Church of England parish registers and nonconformist church registers we keep. Check whether a register is here (recent registers may still be at the church) and if there is a name index. Identify covering dates and a catalogue reference if you want to ask us for a copy baptism, marriage or burial entry.
Search Church Registers
Search Durham Collieries
This index gives you information about collieries in the Durham coalfield from about 1850 to 1990. It includes colliery locations, dates of mine opening and closure, or operating dates, and lists of mine owners before nationalisation of the coal industry in 1947. Linked to the colliery information pages you can view present day maps, historical maps and aerial photographs of the location.
Search Durham Collieries
Search Durham’s Hidden Depths
This is an index to mining ancestors working in the Durham coalfield, giving name, colliery, occupation, date and age. It now contains over 228,000 entries.
Search Durham’s Hidden Depths
Search interactive maps
Our Geographic Information System (GIS) interactive mapping lets you overlay a variety of historical Ordnance Survey maps and aerial photograph surveys onto present day maps.
Use the GIS to study the history of County Durham’s landscape and its development from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.
Search interactive maps
Our collections on other websites
If you’re interested in the First World War, the Durham at War website contains thousands of stories about people, places, events and organisations in County Durham in the First World War.
Durham at War
The Durham Record provides access to thousands of heritage related images from a number of different sources. Most of these images are now cared for by Durham Record Office.
The Durham Record
The People Past and Present Archive contains almost 3,000 images covering the former mining communities and people of East Durham.
People Past and Present Archive
