Celebrating our collections dating from 780AD to the present day
By Alice Millard, project archivist Behind the development of Crawley New Town was a phenomenal group of people. As well as the ten or so members of the executive committee, there were more than 100 employees across planning, estate, legal, administrative, financial and housing departments. These employees were some of the best architects, engineers, town…
Continue reading ➞ Cataloguing Crawley New Town: The Team Behind the Corp.
By Matthew Jones, Assistant County Archivist If you're someone who enjoys researching your family history, there is a huge amount of archive material available at West Sussex Record Office and it's not unusual for people to trace their roots back to the 1700s or earlier still. Boys at The Lancastrian School, Chichester, 1914 (WSRO E35/19/20)…
By Alice Millard, project archivist With funding granted by the Wellcome Trust, nine organisations across England, Wales, and Ireland have embarked upon a major project to catalogue and make accessible the archives of 11 post-war new towns. These new towns are Basildon, Bracknell, Crawley, Cwmbran, Newton Aycliffe, Peterlee, Redditch, Runcorn, Shannon, Stevenage and Warrington. WSRO…
Continue reading ➞ Cataloguing Crawley New Town: What is a ‘new town’?
With May's Coronation on the horizon, a first for many in the country, it seems only fitting we look back through the years and see how the County celebrated the formal accession of King Charles' mother, Queen Elizabeth II, and his grandfather, King George VI. To help mark this occasion, West Sussex Record Office and…
Continue reading ➞ West Sussex Unwrapped IV: A County Celebrates – Coronations Past and Present
By Chris Olver, Project Archivist Until 2020, many people living in the United Kingdom had not experienced living through a pandemic. In a bid to understand Covid-19, many media outlets drew comparisons to the Great Influenza epidemic of 1918-1920, yet it was a pandemic from more recent history which showed how an emerging disease could…
By Nichola Court, Archivist This International Women’s Day 2023, we celebrate the achievements of the Chichester-born suffrage campaigner, Ethel Margaret ‘Madge’ Turner, a woman who spent her adult life campaigning for equity and whose efforts to achieve this have recently been recognised in the city of her birth. The Market House (Butter Market) in North…
By Abigail Hartley, Searchroom Archivist West Sussex County Council Logo It’s hard to miss the numerous badges and arms of a blue shield with yellow birds dotted around West Sussex. You may be surprised to learn, however, that no English county had any arms officially granted to it until after the 1889 Local Government Act.…
Continue reading ➞ Sussex Coat of Arms: Martlets (not) in Flight
By Abigail Hartley, Searchroom Archivist The topics and contents of this blog contain antisemitic and xenophobic attitudes prevalent in 20th century Europe which are outdated, offensive, or discriminatory. This content has been included to authentically represent the original documents and the experiences of those involved and is not an endorsement of these views. On the…
Continue reading ➞ Holocaust Memorial Day – Ordinary People, Bulldogs Bank and the Dann Sisters
By Alice Millard, Research Assistant During our survey of parish registers for entries relating to people of African, Afro-Caribbean, and Indian heritage*, we found the baptism of a teenaged boy called George Diamond Yacoodh in New Shoreham, 1869. George's baptism entry notes that he was a "native of Zanzibar", but was living at St Saviour's…
Continue reading ➞ Stories from the Parish Registers: George Diamond Yacoodh
By Matthew Jones, Assistant County Archivist I'm delighted to say that the Record Office has launched a new programme of “coffee time” workshops for 2023, beginning in January with a session on how to start your family tree As with so many things, the workshops scheduled for 2020 were interrupted by the pandemic and we…
Continue reading ➞ Coffee Time? The Re-launch of workshops for family and local historians
West Sussex Record Office 