Matthew Jones, Assistant County Archivist
In May, a further series of Sussex archives were launched on Ancestry. Wills and other probate records from 1521 to 1858 were added with over 150,000 records for West Sussex, including over 12,000 probate inventories detailing the contents of houses, farms, pubs, trades and businesses across the county.
We’ve made great progress in our efforts to make more material available online. In 2015, we published school admission registers from the 1870s to 1914 on Find My Past.
In 2022, the parish registers and electoral registers for East and West Sussex went on Ancestry and have now had over 10 million views. The parish registers, comprising over 1,900 volumes from West Sussex alone, now contain over 11 million searchable names, offering detailed records of baptisms, marriages and burials from 1538 to 1995.
The electoral registers, from 1832 to 1963, comprise over 8 million records and 150,000 images from West Sussex and over 20 million records and 387,000 images for East Sussex and Brighton and Hove.
These resources provide a fascinating insight into the lives of our ancestors and can be viewed with a paid subscription or for free at the record offices of East and West Sussex and at libraries throughout Sussex.
If you visit us, staff will be on hand to advise you on how to get started and you can also sign up for our beginners’ workshops. The autumn workshops will focus on ‘Getting started with Ancestry.co.uk’ (6 September) and ‘Discovering wills and other probate records’ (4 October). Places are limited so please book soon. Visit our What’s On page for more information.
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West Sussex Record Office 
These online records are very, very useful for those of us researching local as well as family history. We waited a long time, it seems, for the parish registers to be made available but the wills and inventories followed in hot pursuit and were a great bonus. The burning question is….what is next to be digitised and made available online?
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