In a message dated 15/12/2007 12:08:19 GMT Standard Time, [email protected] writes: I know that John was a shipwright and him and Sarah were probably born in the 1770s. However, I have been unable to find their baptisms or deaths. I would be very grateful for any help. If they were born in the 1770s and were baptised in Monkwearmouth St Peter's parish church, you may not be able to find the records of it. St Peter's registers were destroyed in a fire in c1791. An attempt was made later to reconstruct the registers from information handed in by parishioners, taken from eg their family Bibles. Although about three notebooks were filled with such information, they were never written up in chronological order as in a register, and still haven't been in spite of several people to my knowledge having claimed they were about to do so in recent years. It is therefore necessary to work through the three notebooks, filled with fairly random entries, which are now in Durham County Record Office, where they have been microfilmed. Even then, only a small proportion of the entries likely to have existed in the original registers will be accounted for by those "notebook entries". Another approach to finding the baptisms would be to use the BTs. However, for Durham Diocese they do not begin until the 1760s and for the first few years - say up to 1780 - they are very patchy, with some whole years missed out and other years probably incomplete. You should therefore be hoping they were not born in Monkwearmouth parish, Fortunately their childrens' baptisms, as listed in your e-mail, show that they would have been baptised during the "Barrington period" 1798-1812, when quite a lot of information is given for each baptism. That is far more than on the IGI or almost any other transcript or index and it should include a note of the parish of which each parent was a native. That is, the parish where they themselves had been born. Geoff Nicholson