Personal Research Services

If you are having trouble finding your ancestors, perhaps we can help.

• Research in the Durham Record Office: George Turns has many years of experience researching at the Durham County Record Office and is willing to do lookups for customers there. He charges £5 to look up & verify a baptism, marriage, or burial if you already know the date & place, and will make a photocopy and email the scan to you for an additional £2. For more time-consuming research, such as finding a church event in a certain span of years, he charges £15 per hour, £40 for 3 hours, or £60 for 6 hours. If you want George to do some research on his next visit, please let us know.
• Ordering birth, death, or marriage certificates: We also provide assistance in ordering civil registrations of births, marriages, and deaths (after mid-1837) from the government. We search various indexes and navigate through the ordering process for you, and the certificate is sent directly to your home from the General Register Office. For this service, we usually charge the £7 charged by the government for a certificate, plus £3 to £5 to locate the certificate reference (depending on how long it takes us to locate it).
• Occasional lookups at the Tyne & Wear Archives Service (TWAS), where most Northumberland parish registers are held.