DURHAM – Durham County’s history is falling apart, and it will cost taxpayers nearly a million bucks to put it all back together.That’s the cost of restoring an estimated 500,000 birth and death certificates dating back to the late 1800s that, until earlier this year, were stored in a less-than-ideal setting: the basement of the county health department.

County leaders will soon decide whether to spend $945,000 to ship many of the records to a Massachusetts plant to be de-acidified and restored.

“This is a pressing matter,” Willie Covington, Durham County’s register of deeds, told county commissioners this week. “They can’t be scanned; it would destroy some of them.” Read More