Last Sussex Day, 16th June 2016, West Sussex Record Office launched our 70th anniversary celebrations with our very first blog post. We asked our users, depositors, volunteers, supporters and staff to explore the archive and nominate their favourite document. Over the following months, 70 of these unique records featured on this blog, each with its own story to tell and each illuminating a very different aspect of the archives. Since then, we have continued to feature a ‘Record of the Month’, and have used this blog to post topical features, such as our hugely popular ‘Victorian Christmas Traditions in the Archive’ post, and now celebrate our first anniversary as regular bloggers!
Over the past 12 months, our most viewed and shared post was the nostalgic Sense or Insensibility : Chichester in the 1960’s, guest-written by Alan Green, and posted in support of his popular talk given at the Record Office in March. A Record of the Month chosen by searchroom assistant Immie has been our second most popular post about Aerial Photography of Chichester (APH 126, 1904). Immie highlighted one of our more unusual records, an early aerial photograph of Chichester, taken from a hot air balloon! The response from posts like this, and comments from our followers on Twitter and Facebook have shown the importance of spreading the word about West Sussex history, and the work the Record Office does to preserve it.
One year later, and after 98 insightful, interesting and sometimes surprising posts, a total of 9353 people have viewed this blog, from all over the world. Whether you we the one visitor for Nepal or Mozambique, or one of our hundreds of visitors from the UK, US, and Australia, we thank you for your support and continued readership, and hope to continue intriguing and entertaining you for some time yet.
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