Release date: No longer stocked

The 1841 Durham set consists of 8 CDs covering the whole of the county as it was defined in 1841, containing 8-bit scanned greyscale images (i.e. 256 shades of grey, more like photographs than black & white photocopies) of the original enumerators handwritten books.  These are in DjVu format, which open in a standard web browser such as Internet Explorer (no internet connection required to browse them) using a free plugin viewer which is supplied on the CDs, or the latest version is freely available for download from the internet.

Note that County Durham back then included parts of the coastline now in Northumberland, eg: Tweedmouth & Holy Island - check the area index by clicking on the "View Online" button to see exactly which parts are included in the Durham 1841 census (you do not need to register or log in just to view the index).

An area index is supplied on the CDs listing towns, villages, parishes and hamlets and the film/folio numbers they are stored under, to aid in tracking down the areas you want to look at.  There is no surname index though, so you may have to read through quite a few pages to find your relatives!  This is not usually as daunting as it at first sounds, and makes it a bit more interesting as you build up a mental picture of the neighbourhood and occupations of others in the area at the time.

Sit down with a cup of coffee and enjoy!

The supplied DjVu viewer works on nearly all PCs running Windows 98 or newer.  Most Mac and Linux setups can download a free viewer from the web - see www.lizardtech.com and www.djvuzone.org for more information.
 

£9.95