AFTER 93 years light has finally been shed on the mystery of where many of the 168 men and boys who died in the North-East's worst ever pit disaster lie.

Last year The Advertiser revealed that the final resting places of more than 40 victims of the 1909 West Stanley Burns Pit explosion had been lost.

But now, after a year's intensive work, amateur local historian and former pitman Bob Drake, 63, has made sense of conflicting council and church archives - after an exciting chance discovery.

The problem of the missing names emerged when The Advertiser and its sister paper The Northern Echo launched a widely supported campaign to mark the mass burial trenches with a simple tribute. But, when it came to establishing exactly who was buried in the three unmarked burial trenches at the old council cemetery behind St Andrew's Church in Stanley, historians were left puzzled.

Mr Drake, of Belle Street in Stanley, scanned each church and council record while reading newspapers of the period and spent many hours in church and council cemeteries across north Durham.

He even took a trowel to investigate half-buried gravestones and, at one point, helped arrange for a tree to be dug up to reveal another headstone.

Then, after nearly eight months and a number of small successes including discovering that some men and boys were buried elsewhere in the North-East, Mr Drake had a major breakthrough.

"I was looking through the old Stanley Urban District Council records in Consett and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a sheet with all my familiar names on. When the archivist came back I asked to see it. It was the internment sheet. I couldn't believe my eyes."

However, even the internment sheet was inconclusive and there are still several mysteries. There is still doubt about which of the men and boys are buried in which of the three burial trenches and two names, Thomas Killingback and William Brophy, remain unaccounted for.

However, for the first time, the names of 56 men and boys buried in unmarked mass burial trenches and unmarked private graves can now be publicly revealed. They will be given pride of place at a major fundraising exhibition at Stanley's Lamplight Theatre between Friday, February 14 and Sunday, February 16.

Meanwhile Mr Drake revealed his quest to do right by the victims of the great disaster had slowly begun to take over his life.

"I couldn't sleep," he said. "The names would just keep whirling around my head. There has been problems you wouldn't believe. The same person given different names on different records, outrageously different spellings, different addresses, the lot.

"There's still a lot of research to do. However I couldn't do any of it without the help of all the archivists at the record offices."