About searching Durham Records Online

Navigating the site

Wildcards

In any Name field, you may use % or * as a wildcard to match 0 or more characters, but not the first character. You may also use an underscore to match any single character. For example:

• Smith* or Smith% will match Smith, Smithers, Smithson, etc.
• Smith_ will match Smithe but not Smithson
• g%smith or g*smith will match Goldsmith, Garsmith, Gunsmith, etc.
• Smi%th or Smi*th will match Smith, Smirpeth, Sminneth, etc.
• %smith and *smith are not allowed as they put too heavy a load on the system

Search Strategy

Many names in our database have been cross-indexed to non-obvious matches, such as Smurfitt and Smurthwaite, or Hindmarsh and Hymers. These variants of names were gleaned from years of reading old records, and they can help you trace your ancestry through the centuries of spelling changes.

If you can't find the person you're looking for, try reducing the name to a wildcard pattern, especially if the name can be spelled many ways - for example, to find the name Wanless, which can also be spelled Wanlass, Wandless, Wanlace, etc., you might try w%n%l%s% and w%n%l%c% and see what results you get.

If the spelling of the name you are seeking is highly variable, try searching for just the first letter of each name - for example, for Lancelot Friar, you could search for:
First Name: L%
Last Name: F%
This may produce a long list of matches, but if you then click the the Edit Search button and add an event year or birth year and set the Year Range to plus/minus 5 years or 10 years, you will whittle down the list considerably.

Use the New Search button before you start a search for a new person, to ensure that a field is not left accidentally filled in, which may cause no results to be found.

Filling In the Search Form

At least one name field must be filled in with something other than a wildcard, unless you are searching for all members of an occupation, in which case only Occupation has to be filled in.

The Search is not case-sensitive; "Best" or "best" will return the same results.

First Name: Enter the given name of the person you are seeking. This can include spaces and middle names. For example, John, John Paul, and John Paul William are all valid.
Last Name: Enter the last name of the person you are seeking.

• Check Middle Names: Searches the Middle Names in our database for the name you enter in the First Name field, instead of searching the First Name fields in our database. For example, enter First Name: John and Last Name: Smith and click Check Middle Names and you will get results for Thomas John Smith, William John Smith, etc., but not results for John Smith.
• This option is useful for finding people who have a family surname as their middle name - enter just the family surname in the First Name field to find all people with that surname as their middle name.

Birth Year: You can restrict your search by specifying a person's year of birth in 4 digits. You can set the Range to Exact or to a range of 2, 5, 10, or 20 years on either side of the specified year. For example, you can search for all the Bests who were born between 1810 and 1820 (set Year and Range to 1815 +- 5 years).

• When searching in baptisms, the search will look for people baptized or born in the birth year or year range. This allows you to find adults who were baptized long after their birth. For example, Alexander Logan, born about 1828, was not baptized until 1864, but a search for his birth year of 1828 will pick up his 1864 baptism because his age is stated in his baptism.
• When searching in marriages, burials, or censuses, an additional option applies:
  • Show All Possibilities - the default, which returns all matching marriages, burials, and census records where the age is not stated (or is illegible) in the record and the event occurred in a reasonable time frame (marriage from 14 to 90 years after the birth, burial from 0 to 120 years after the birth, census in or after the birth year). This filters out results that occurred before your person was born or after they likely died. If the age is stated in the record, it will appear in the search results, so you can tell which records are matched on age and which are matched as "could have happened during a normal lifespan".
  • Show Only Exact Matches - the opposite of Show All Possibilities; select this option to retrieve only records where the age at marriage, burial, or census time computes to an exact match with the birth year or within the birth year range. You can use this to restrict your search if you get too many results with Show All Possibilities turned on.
  • Show All Possibilities / Show Only Exact Matches is ignored if there is no birth year entered.

Search In: You can leave this set to All Records or you can limit your search to a specific census, all censuses, all parish records, or a particular class of parish records, such as Baptisms, Marriages, or Burials.

• Choosing Marriages searches both the marriage registers and the marriage bonds, or you can search just the Marriage Bonds separately.
• Choosing Burials includes the cemetery registers, or you can search Cemetery Registers separately.
• Choosing All Parish Records will search Baptisms, Marriages, Marriage Bonds, Burials, and Cemetery Registers.
• You can also limit your search to a particular registration district, except when searching in Marriage Bonds (when the district filter will be ignored because marriage bonds were not issued on a per-district basis, so the entire marriage bond database will be searched). See which parishes were in each district.

Parish Record Options

These filters are applied only to parish records; they are ignored in census record searches.

Father's First Name and Father's Last Name: Specifies the father's name in a parish record. For example, if you want to find only the Mary Smiths who were born to John Smith, you would put Mary in the First Name field, Smith in the Last Name field, and John in the Father's First Name field, and select Baptisms from the Search In drop-down box.

Mother's First Name and Mother's Maiden Surname: You can further limit your search by filling in the Mother's First Name field and/or by entering her maiden surname in the Mother's Maiden Surname field.

You can search for baptism, marriage, or burials records for all the children of a parent or pair of parents; for example, all the children of John and Sarah Thompson, or all the children of John Thompson, or all the children with the surname Thompson and a mother named Sarah, or the children of a mother whose maiden name was Sarah Smith.

• Filling in Father or Mother and selecting All Records forces the search to be in All Parish Records. If you select All Censuses or a specific census, the Father and Mother fields are ignored and a census search is performed without those filters applied.
• To show all the children of a parent or pair of parents, put the child's surname in the Last Name field and fill in either the Father's First Name or Mother's First Name field or both. Select Baptisms, Marriages, or Burials from the Search In drop-down box if you want to limit the search to a specific record set.
• To find all the baptisms, marriages, and burials of the children of a specific mother (where her maiden name is shown in the record), enter only the Mother's First Name and Mother's Maiden Surname. Leave First Name and Last Name blank. This can turn up records for a woman having children across several marriages and surnames. For the broadest array of results, you can search on just a maiden surname. This will also pick up women who are listed under their surname from an earlier marriage.
• You can also reduce the name with further wildcards, to pick up variants: %c%r%y will pick up Corry, Carey, Scorey, etc.
• Marriages hardly ever record the groom's or bride's mother, and they rarely recorded the fathers before 1837. If you are filling in a father and mother and getting no marriage results, try just the father. Then try just the first initial of the father's name plus the wildcard; for example: P%
  If you are still getting no results, clear both parent fields.
• Burial records rarely include the names of the parents, but many did during the 1798-1812 period.
• If you specify the father or mother when searching for the burial of a child, be aware that in burials, a parent is sometimes listed by only their initials, with no indication of gender ("child of G.W. Smith"), so we have filed such parents in the father column. Likewise, a parent with a unisex name like Leslie or Evelyn is filed under father.
• The "mother's maiden surname" search is most effective in Anglican baptisms and burials between 1798 and 1812. Outside that period, only a few priests recorded mother's maiden surnames in baptisms, and not all did so within that period. Catholic marriages recorded the bride's or groom's mother's maiden name; it was rare for other denominations to do so.

Spouse: During a marriage search, you can specify a spouse’s first name, in combination with First Name, Last Name, or both. This should help narrow down the list of results for people searching common names. For example, you can search for:

• Alice Smith who married a George
• George Wanless who married an Alice
• any George to any Alice (this returns many results, so can be slow, but is useful if you have unusual first names and a hard-to-read surname)
• any groom surname with any bride first name, or any bride surname with any groom first name
• The Spouse field is ignored during searches of all other records - it is only applied to Marriages and Marriage Bonds.

Event Year: You can restrict your search by specifying the year of the baptism, marriage, or burial in 4 digits. You can set the Range to Exact or to a range of 2, 5, 10, or 20 years on either side of the specified year. For example, you can search for all the Bests who were buried between 1810 and 1820 (set Event Year and Range to 1815 +- 5 years).

Search for this person mentioned ONLY as a Witness, Godparent, Grandparent, Other Relative, Employer, etc.: Parish records can contain lots of hidden information that may provide clues to unraveling your ancestral mysteries. Baptisms may list godparents, grandparents, employers, or other relatives. Burials may list employers, siblings, spouses, an adult child, or other relatives. Marriages may have up to 6 witnesses and former spouses may be mentioned. All of these "peripherally involved" people are searched when you click this checkbox. If you click this checkbox, the primary fields are not searched at the same time. We feel it would be unfair to show you a table of results where you are unable to tell if the person you searched for is a primary participant in the record (bride, groom, parent, child, deceased person) or a peripherally involved person, so we present this information in a completely separate search.

• The name in the search results will be the name of the primary person in the record (if it's a marriage, the name will be the groom). So, for example, if you search for Thomas Wandless in All Parish Records and you check this checkbox, the search results list will show you the baptism of Margaret Smailes. This is because Thomas Wandless is named as her mother's father in her baptism.

Census Options

These filters are applied only to census records; they are ignored in parish record searches.

Occupation:

• You may limit your search in the censuses to, say, all the people named John Wilson who were blacksmiths. Filling in the Occupation field forces the search to be in censuses only. You may select a specific census. If you select All Records or anything other than a specific census, the search will be in All Censuses.
• You may also use this field to show all the people who held a particular job - fill in just the Occupation field and nothing else to see, for example, all the gunsmiths in all the censuses.

In Census Household Headed By: This allows you to limit your search to only households with this head of household. For example, if you want to find only the Mary Smiths who lived in a household headed by John Smith, you would put Mary in the First Name field, Smith in the Last Name field, John in the Head First Name field, and Smith in the Head Last Name field.

• Filling in Head First or Head Last Name and selecting All Records forces the search to be in All Census Records. If you select All Parish Records, Baptisms, Marriages, or Burials, the Head First and Head Last Name are ignored and a search is performed on the selected parish records without those filters applied.
• In the 1841 census, the first person in the household is considered the Head of Household, since the designation Head was not used then.
• In a multi-family household, the filter looks only at the first Head in the house, so for the small percentage of families who are listed after the first family, the result will be less meaningful.
• If the person you are searching for IS the Head of Household, a match will be returned. For example, if you search for Thomas Jones in households headed by Thomas Jones, a household headed by Thomas Jones with no other Thomas Jones in the house will match.
• If you fill in either the Head First or Head Last Name field, you must fill in at least 3 alphabetic characters in the main First Name field.

Customise the display of your search results

Sort by: You may choose to sort your results by First Name (the default), Birth Year, or Event Year.

• Birth Year: the records will be sorted by the year of birth of the person if it is included in the record or if it can be computed from the person's age; otherwise, by event year. This is useful for seeing collections of people born in the same time frame (for example, all the Chandlers born in Sunderland district between 1800 and 1810, sorted by order of birth). This sort order also helps track a person across several censuses and other events, as it groups people by birth year.
• Event Year sorts the events in the order they happened, no matter when the people were born. This is useful for seeing collections of people living in the same time frame (for example, all the Chandlers who were born, married, appeared in a census, or died in Sunderland district between 1840 and 1850. (To do this, leave the Event Year box in the Parish Records Options section blank, select All Records, sort by Event Year, and page forward in the results until you reach 1840.)

Results per page: This allows you to choose how many search results you want to see on each page: 15, 25, 50, 200, or 500.

Invoke the Search

When you have filled in all the fields you want, click on the Search button. See the Census Information and Parish Record Information pages for assistance in interpreting your search results.

Getting Help

You can access this page by clicking Search Help on the Search Form, or by clicking How To Search in the left menu.

Limitations

• Your search results are limited to 5,000 records total, and 500 records per record set (i.e. 500 from Baptisms, 500 from the 1841 Census, etc.) to avoid overloading the system.