Durham OS Name Books

After a group of AA members had helped Professor Diana Whaley to complete her Northumberland OS Name Books project, my late wife, Val and I decided to launch a similar project for County Durham. In October 2019 and February 2020 we spent two weeks at The National Archives in Kew, photographing the Name Books for the First Edition OS maps from the 1850s and took almost 10,000 photographs.

The Name Books were all stored at the Ordnance Survey’s main depot in Southampton and most of them were destroyed by incendiary bombing during the Second World War. The ones for Cumberland, Westmorland, County Durham and Northumberland, with some from Hampshire were the only ones saved, some with fire damage.

The Covid pandemic, with its accompanying restrictions and then the sudden, devastating loss of Val in August 2020, delayed the start of the transcription project. Stephen Eastmead grey-scaled the images to introduce some uniformity – the papers, inks and general states of preservation of the books varied tremendously. Diana Whaley was very helpful in getting us started, with access to materials and software developed for the Northumberland project. There is a loyal band of transcribers who work diligently on Excel spreadsheets based on ten Name Book pages each.

We have now been transcribing since the spring of 2022 and by January 2025 we have covered 6800 images. It has been both enjoyable and fascinating, as we are looking at a snapshot of County Durham in the 1850s. This was a time of remarkable change in which a predominantly rural county was transforming into a massive industrial complex with a large influx of workers and their families from other parts of England and from Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

We held our second progress meeting in November 2024 and the photograph shows most of the transcribers, a mixture of AA members and other volunteers. The plan is to have the County Durham Name Books on their own website when we have completed our work, like the Northumberland ones, which are at namebooks.org.uk

The accompanying images show the outside cover of the first Name Book that we photographed and its first and last pages. This example is in good condition but one has to remember that the books were created 170 years ago, were originally stitched together with cotton and later dismantled, hole-punched and held together with treasury tags. The stitch holes are still visible and some books have remains of the cotton in place. The punched holes often go through words which does not help transcription and sometimes the pages were inadvertently turned round. Some books have been re-arranged and renumbered. Often the surveyor signed his name and title in the bottom right corner of the page and the final page in a book was signed off by the appropriate Royal Engineers officer, as shown.

To view a larger version of the image on a laptop right-click inside the image.

To view a larger version of the image on a mobile phone press and hold the image.

We are all looking forward to having our work live on its website. The project is dedicated to the memory of Val, for the work that she did and for her enduring encouragement.