THE records of 200,000 miners who worked in the Durham Coalfield can now be viewed online.

Volunteers working on Mining Durham’s Hidden Depths project have spent five years cataloguing and indexing records from Durham Miners’ Association.

Their work means that visitors to the Durham County Record Office website can search for a miner online and find out what records are held in the archives for that person.

The project was launched in 2009 with funding for just six months.

However, some volunteers have continued indexing copies of arbitration committee minutes, signing-on books, accident books and other documents and now the number of miners referenced has reached 200,000.

Liz Bregazzi, county archivist, said: “We are very grateful to all of our volunteers for their hard work in helping build up this important database.“The database is very popular, receiving more than 100,000 page views last year and about 45,000 so far this year so it’s great that it continues to grow.

“Anyone who has checked the index in the past and not been able to find the miner they are searching for should definitely take another look now that so many more names have been added.”

Some of the records that have been indexed are lists of workers’ names alongside the colliery where they worked.

However, other records give much more detail about individual miners and any injuries and compensation they and their dependants received.

The database is at www.durhamrecordoffice.org.uk