The Mining Durham’s Hidden Depths project brought together over 100 enthusiastic volunteers to index records in the Durham Miners’ Association (DMA) trade union archive at the Record Office.

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The Story Mount Oswald South Road Durham DH1 3TQ collections@thestorydurham.org

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Mining Durham’s Hidden Depths was a Learning Revolution Transformation Fund project. The National Council on Archives awarded Durham County Record Office Archive Pace Setter status for this project in April 2010.

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Information about the Mining Durham’s Hidden Depths index to miners named in the Durham Miners’ Association records and other collections at Durham County Record Office.

You can search Durham’s Hidden Depths by keyword, or select from options to search by name/age/occupation/colliery/lodge/other location/date/event/document reference. There is also a link on the search page to browse by name.

Some of the records indexed are simple lists of workers’ names, associated with a particular colliery, and the original document may not contain much more information than the index.  Other records give a surprising amount of detail about individual miners, their injuries and their dependents. The union records include accident compensation records and many miners are documented because coal mining was such a dangerous industry. The project is continuing and it is possible that other records relating to an individual will be indexed later. A search of the main Record Office database may give other references to that individual (you should only search for their surname) but, if not, we may be able to help you if you use our paid Research Service.

The project ran from October 2009 to March 2010 and resulted in the creation of online indexes to a number of the records in the DMA collection. Several volunteers have continued to index the records and the total number of names in the database is now over 229,000.