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