Celebrating our collections dating from 780AD to the present day
By Imogen Russell, Archives Assistant Since 1989, the Record Office’s home has been 3 Orchard Street, and houses the records of the county's rich and diverse history, from its earliest document the Oslac Charter, dating from 780AD, to its most renowned the Sussex Declaration. A blog post on the history of the Record Office was…
Continue reading ➞ What was here before the Record Office? A brief history of 3 Orchard Street
By Alice Millard, archivist October is Black History Month (BHM) across the UK. This year, the theme is ''Honouring Our Communities'. The archive is full of documented communities from across West Sussex, from the Anglo Saxons to the present day. However, archives across the UK have historically neglected collecting documented histories of Black and Asian…
Continue reading ➞ The Black servicemen of the 9th US Air Force in Petworth, 1944
By Carina Rosas, Senior Conservator Within the church court records of the Chichester Diocese, a series labelled as miscellaneous court papers, dated 1550’s to 1850’s, was suspected to contain a wealth of information on day-to-day life in West Sussex. It had suffered some damage in the past and the vulnerability of many documents meant cataloguing…
Continue reading ➞ Conservation of the Miscellaneous Court Papers
By Victoria Evans, Searchroom Archivist With the imminent beginning of the exhibition at the British Museum, we thought it was a perfect time to look into Bosham’s connection to the Bayeux Tapestry. The tapestry is nearly 70 metres long, and it is quite an honour that one of our parishes features! Christianity has most likely…
By Mia Curtis-Mays, Archives Assistant On the 10 July 1944, two V1 flying bombs, more commonly known as doodle bugs, caused devastation in Crawley. Blowing up at the junction of Oak Road and West Street, the blast killed 7 people and seriously injured 44. Over 1,200 premises were damaged and 24 were destroyed. Another doodle…
By Alice Millard, Archivist This blog will explore the lives of some of the girls and women of St Margaret’s Convent through their archive. The Sisters of St Margaret were originally founded to nurse the poor and sick. They also ran an orphanage and a school called St Agnes’ and St Michael’s, to which fee-paying…
Continue reading ➞ Lives Beyond the Convent Walls: Stories from St Margaret’s
By Nick Corbo-Stewart, Archivist and Volunteer Coordinator In this series of blogs looking at new collections at West Sussex Record Office (WSRO), I will continue to guide you, the reader, through the variety of work undertaken by the volunteers. Through a culmination of sorting, listing, ordering, cataloguing and packaging, their completed collections are now open…
By Victoria Evans. Searchroom Archivist In our ongoing efforts to list all of our building plans from across the county, I kept coming across America Lane and New England Road within the Cuckfield Urban District plans. From this, I searched Google Maps and found other America-related named roads such as Washington Road, Pilgrims Gardens, Boston…
By Jenny Bettger, Archives Assistant (Research) Researching family history is often searching through increasingly hard-to-read documents, trying to find more than just the basic facts about our ancestors. Beyond the first few generations, you are unlikely to have any photographs or idea of what the people looked like. Photographs can help us to connect to…
By Victoria Evans, Searchroom Archivist, in collaboration with Jennifer Mason, Senior Archivist (Collections Manager), and Linda and Catherine, WSRO cataloguing volunteers Within our Episcopal Records, the miscellaneous court papers (MCPs) are a set of documents that have remained largely unknown to us, as they have been in too poor a condition to enable them to…
Continue reading ➞ Cataloguing the Miscellaneous Court Papers