Celebrating our collections dating from 780AD to the present day
By Alan Green - Guest Speaker In this talk local historian and author Alan Green will, with the aid of Stella Palmer’s slides and some others, take you on a tour of the city as it was fifty years ago; a city preparing for pedestrianisation but still ruled by the motor car. You will see…
By Chris Olver, Project Archivist In this post, our project archivist documenting HIV and AIDS archives in the UK gives a short tour of some of the online HIV/AIDS archives in the UK. This is second blog in a series and the first part can be found here. In the course of my work so…
Continue reading ➞ New ways of seeing: independent HIV and AIDS web-based archives
Please note that this blog post contains some graphic descriptions of injury. By Victoria Evans, Searchroom Archivist Working in an archive allows you the opportunity to stumble upon unexpected pieces of history and how it was recorded. As we answer enquiries on all manner of subjects it is sometimes too easy to fall down a…
Continue reading ➞ Murder, They Wrote…in the register of baptisms
Ian Everest - Guest Speaker Some forty years ago Ian Everest started out on the journey of researching his family history and just like many others who embark on the same path, his life has never been the same since! It brought about change of career into an occupation which was directly related to his…
Continue reading ➞ Tuesday Talk: The Women’s Land Army – a Sussex connection
Manor Royal is a distinctive district of Crawley. It was earmarked early in the New Town's planning stage as the perfect area to contain the town's industrial pursuits. From its opening in the early 1950s, it has been home to factories, big and small, large warehouses, and offices. However, where once the district was a…
Continue reading ➞ Cataloguing Crawley New Town: An Industrial Haven
By Dr Sue Berry FSA, FRHistS - guest speaker Gravetye Manor, GM, the estate of William Robinson who made his money from writing about gardens, and shaped public taste. This talk is about the small country leisure house estates established in the Weald of Sussex between about 1840 - 1914 (during the reigns of Queen…
By Nichola Court, Archivist Extract from the anonymous Flapper's diary, noting her journey down to Chichester and various activities in the area (ref AM 75/1) Last week's blog explored the story behind an 'anonymous "flapper's" diary', bought by WSRO at auction in 2008 and later catalogued as AM 75/1. Thanks to the meticulous research carried…
Continue reading ➞ ‘Who’s that girl?’ The anonymous diary of a 1920s flapper (part 2)
By Nichola Court, Archivist Extract from the anonymous Flapper's diary, noting her journey down to Chichester and various activities in the area (ref AM 75/1) In 2008, WSRO purchased at auction an item listed as ‘a “flapper’s” social diary’ (catalogued as AM 75/1). Although the diary is short, covering barely three months, the auctioneers noted…
Continue reading ➞ ‘Who’s that girl?’ The anonymous diary of a 1920s flapper (part 1)
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. Probate inventory…
By Chris Olver, Project Archivist In this post, our project archivist documenting HIV/AIDS archives in the UK highlights some of the history of HIV/AIDS sources currently available online. A surprising aspect of my current work surveying HIV and AIDS records in the United Kingdom was discovering how much archival content was available to view online.…
Continue reading ➞ Margaret Thatcher to Geronimo: HIV and AIDS archives available online
West Sussex Record Office 