By Nick Corbo-Stewart, Volunteer Coordinator and Archivist
In the week that celebrates the 40th anniversary of this event, organised by the NCVO (The National Council for Voluntary Organisations), we at the West Sussex Record Office (WSRO) would like to thank all our volunteers from the local community who make a positive contribution towards the services WSRO provides.
Over the years, our volunteers have come from a wide range of backgrounds and locations to devote their time to WSRO’s service. Throughout 2023-2024, they have continued working on numerous historic specialist and generic collections. Their invaluable efforts means that more West Sussex collections are now being catalogued and opened to researchers, whose interest spans many topics which our volunteers are involved in. These volunteers are helping us:
- Uncover our social history, through listing of names and professions of people found in our Quarter Sessions records project.
- Revealing our industrial history heritage, by cataloguing a variety of historic manufacturing, building and administrative business activity across the County.
- Documenting our community service history, ranging from local government to the activities of planning groups.
- Adding to our legal history, through processing deeds from across the whole of West Sussex. Covering many centuries, these deeds reflect national or local legal changes, and our volunteers have documented the exchange of land, property and will of the people, whether it is in the city of Chichester, or in the large towns such as Horsham, Crawley, Worthing, Burgess Hill, or villages and in the countryside beyond.
- Opening an historic visual panorama of the population, events and places associated with West Sussex. This continues to emerge from volunteer work on our multiple photograph and slide collections covering river courses, coastal scenes, the Downs, industrial activity, buildings, sporting events, celebrations and the life all kinds of people from every walk of life.
These are a taste of just some of the work on these and many other collections the WSRO volunteers engage with.
In addition, WSRO continues to present opportunities for our volunteers to learn new skills in research, transcription, listing, sorting, checking, conservation, packaging, information technology, data manipulation and item handling. It also a place to meet each other, and members of staff who share the same passion for the care and development of our archive.
It is the volunteers invaluable support that helps the Record Office to continue to provide a varied and vibrant public service to all our visitors and those accessing our services remotely.
We at the Record Office would like to say a big thank you to our volunteers, for continuing to work before, during this NCVO National Volunteer Week and beyond.
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West Sussex Record Office 
I’ve really enjoyed working on projects for the Record Office over the past 10+ years particularly indexing many of the Quarter Session records. It feels as though I’m giving something back in return for all the help I’ve received researching my own family history. The staff are a great team to work for and I’ve made several good friends. Give it a go!
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