Hello Geoff Hello Geoff Thank you for the informative message. Unfortunately there are other place that have also had valuable information destroyed by fire over the years. Will carry on researching other lines and hopefully one day someone may recognise the names. Cheers Garry . ----- Original Message ----- From: <NEGenealogy@aol.com> To: <ENG-DURHAM@rootsweb.com> Sent: Wednesday, July 01, 2009 2:02 AM Subject: Re: [ENG-DURHAM] STOREY, Phoebe > > In a message dated 30/06/2009 00:09:35 GMT Daylight Time, > suegarry@paradise.net.nz writes: > > Phoebe STOREY married to John DODDS on 15 Dec 1782 at St Peteres > Monkwearmouth and they had the following children > > William b 1783 > Mary b 1784 > John b 1788 > Marjorie b 1791 > James b 1792 > Robert b 1795 > > Phoebe may be the daughter of George STOREY and Mary born 13 Apr 1763. > > > > > A major difficulty in tracing any Monkwearmouith family during the years > before 1791 is that the parish registers were all lost in a fire in that > year. Of course, the BTs still exist, but only back to thje 170s and for > the > first few of those years they are in a poor condition. An attempt was > made > in the early 1790s to reconstruct the burnt registers, using information > from Family Bibles etc, but only a small proportion of the originally > large > number of entries was ever retrieved in that way. That information is > now > held in four unindexed, non-chronological volumes, kept in Durham County > Record Office alongside the post-1791 parish registers. > > Over the last 30-plus years I have heard several times that "so-and-so > is compiling a chronological and/or indexed transcript of those > notebooks", sometimes including information from the BTs or with marriage > information > from the Durham Diocesan Marriage Bonds or with burial information from > the pitifully few surviving MIs. However, I have never heard of anyone > finishing the job! > > The effect of all that is to make the checking of statements about > Monkwearmouth families pre-1791 very difficult and, indeed, when a search > of > the registers over a few years - to check whether an entry which appears > to > "fit" is the only one to do so, or just one out of many possibilities, > for > instance - is needed, it can be impossible to do. The recent putting of > the BTs on-line is a great help here, but it can only add roughly one > more > generation. > > Geoff Nicholson > > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > ENG-DURHAM-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the > quotes in the subject and the body of the message >