Celebrating our collections dating from 780AD to the present day
By Imogen Russell, Searchroom Assistant Alice, one of our Social media fairies, posted images of this document at the beginning of lockdown. Click here for the original post on Facebook. I managed to gain copies before beginning to work from home, allowing me to write about the subject of this week's blog post - The…
By Imogen Russell, Searchroom Assistant. Wednesday 1st April 2020. This is a bit like the assignment you’d get, as a child, when your teacher would ask you to write about What You Did On Your Holiday. Well, we’ve been asked by our Social Media officers - Abbie and Alice - to write about what we…
Continue reading ➞ A Day In the Life… of a Searchroom Assistant
By Imogen Russell, Searchroom Assistant Bognor Observer, Wednesday 11th October 1933. This year marks my tenth anniversary of working at the Record Office and for this blog I thought I'd review one of my most memorable cataloguing projects. I could have chosen AM 760 – letters of Admiral Sir George Murray, the subject of previous…
By Imogen Russell, Searchroom Assistant Though it is more the norm to write blogs on individual documents, I thought I’d talk about a series of records listed under our Episcopal collection, known as faculties. Faculties are permissions from the Diocese for parish churches to alter the fabric of their buildings. As the Diocesan Record Office,…
Like most people I like baking and cooking, so when Lauren (our Searchroom Archivist) set the challenge to try some historic recipes from the archives, I jumped at the chance to have a go. One thing I noticed when going through the recipe books held at the Record Office was that over the centuries, there…
From the 18th – 21st of October this Year, the Chichester Festival Theatre car park at Northgate will be closed for Chichester’s annual Sloe Fair, representing a tradition that has lasted for over 900 years It is the longest-running, and last surviving of five ancient fairs in the city, as the right to hold the Sloe…
Continue reading ➞ ‘All the fun of the Fair’: A history of Chichester’s oldest surviving fair
Forgery and Scandal at Chichester Old Bank I first came across the story around this month’s record when volunteering at Chichester District Museum (now the Novium). The Social History Curator at the time said that sometime in the early 1800s a man -John Binstead, a drawing teacher, was charged with forging a bank note from…
Aerial Photography of Chichester (APH 126, 1904) A type of record not mentioned in our 70th Anniversary booklet or previously on this blog is aerial photography; In particular early aerial photographs, like this one from 1904. According to the caption it was taken at 1500ft in a hot air balloon by Aeronaut Percival Spencer on 4th…
Add Mss 2857 Estate Map of the Manor of Prinsted (1640) In previous blog posts on West Sussex Record Office map collections, we have touched on a number of estate maps, and I feel that the Prinsted Manor Estate map of 1640 is definitely worth an entry as Record of the Month. On it you can see houses are…
Chosen by Imogen Russell, member of staff Those tracing their family history within the Church of England will find that it is fairly straightforward, discovering baptisms, marriages and deaths in the parish registers held at the Record Office. However it is not always clear how you search for families who subscribed to a religion…
Continue reading ➞ Non-conformist records: Bosham Congregational Church Book (NC /C1/2/1)
