In a message dated 27/06/2009 09:23:55 GMT Daylight Time, watsonb@iinet.com.au writes: would SKS have the Bishopwearmouth BT's I have a marriage of Henry Clough and Ann Barrass that I would like to know more about. Where is Bishopwearmouth? The family seemed to be centred around Kelloe, Cohoe and Haswell then disappear after the 1851 census. Their daughter Margaret was born in Kelloe in 1839 and they were 1841 census at Coxhoe then 1851 census were at Haswell. Margaret and brother James migrated to Australia in 1856 Marilyn: Bishopwearmouth BTs should be freely available on-line from the Mormon web site, just as are BTs for the rest of Co Durham. However, why seek the BTs? The original parish registers are kept in Durham County Record Office, where the staff will search them for you at a reasonable rate. Bishopwearmouth is one of the two original (later three) parishes which made up the centre of the modern city of Sunderland. Bishopwearmouth was originally the distrfict close to the mouth of the River Wear which lay on the south side of the river. Opposite it was Monkwearmouth, where there was a famous pre-conquest monastery, and which became the centre of a parish of that name. On the Bishopwearmouth (south) side, at the very tip of the land at the actual river-mouth, there was a small fishing community which developed into a place called Sunderland. Sunderland got its own church in 1719, though it remained, as a Parochial Chapelry, part of the parish of Bishopwearmouth. When the population boomed in the 19th century, all those parishes became divided into others, and the influence of Sunderland grew so great that the whole of the merged town became known by that name. Nowadays it has spread itself for many miles inland, such that even Washington, some 6/7/8 miles away, is part of what is now known as the City of Sunderland. Kelloe, Coxhoe (don't omit the "x"!) and Haswell are all former large pit villages further south in Co Durham. Miners moved around quite a lot and it would be not at all unusual for one family to have lived in all those places at different times. Sunderland itself was much more than a pit village. It had many different industries, of which the main one was ship-building. There was some exporting of coal, however, from staithes (the jetties at the ends of dedicated colliery railways) in Bishopwearmouth, and also one large mine, opened c1850, in Monkwearmouth. That one was one of the last north-east pits to close, in the early 1990s, and its site is now the "Stadium of Light", the only Premiership Professional Football Stadium left in the north-east of England. Geoff Nicholson