Celebrating our collections dating from 780AD to the present day
WSRO Acc 19802 - Ernest Wilson standing in the Highdown gardens By Jennifer Mason, Senior Collections Management Archivist In two prior blog posts staff at WSRO have talked about the work that they’ve been doing at home through the pandemic. Today’s blog post is just one example of how we’ve been able to continue to…
Continue reading ➞ Explorations in the Highdown Gardens Archive
As of 2021, Eastergate school has been almost ceaselessly teaching for more than 185 years. It has served the parish, and also the surrounding localities, by educating numerous generations of West Sussex families. As you will have seen in the film footage below, the school underwent a huge transformation in 1970; turning from a traditional…
Continue reading ➞ West Sussex Unwrapped II: Month 3 – 185 years of Eastergate school
By the staff of West Sussex Record Office Did any of us expect the new decade to start off in such a manner? It has now been one year since the first announcement of lockdown was declared. Last year, staff put together a blog outlining what we had been working on from home. In hindsight,…
Continue reading ➞ Working From Home: One Year Later – Collections
By the staff of West Sussex Record Office Did any of us expect the new decade to start off in such a manner? It has now been one year since the first announcement of lockdown was declared. Last year, staff put together a blog outlining what we had been working on from home. In hindsight,…
Continue reading ➞ Working From Home: One Year Later – The Searchroom
Today, we mark International Women’s Day by taking a look at one of the lesser-known but no less important political groups which advocated women’s suffrage during the early 20th century. The activities of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and their leaders – Millicent Fawcett…
By Kim Leslie (with an Introduction by Nichola Court) In his first blog, Kim Leslie introduced us to some of his more colourful ancestors, whose lives – at times, dramatic - are revealed in his family papers – The Corfield Papers. In his second blog, Kim focuses on his grandfather, Dr Carruthers Corfield, whose papers…
Continue reading ➞ THE CORFIELD PAPERS – A New Accession: Part Two
Today Crawley is a thriving town of over 110,000 people and is the largest inland town in West Sussex. However, what is now a bustling metropolis started life as the quiet rural villages of Crawley, Ifield, and Three Bridges. Read on to find out how and why this changed. Crawley on Film Queen Elizabeth II…
Continue reading ➞ West Sussex Unwrapped II Month 1: Crawley New Town
By Abigail Hartley, Searchroom Archivist Maps are one of the most useful resources for family, local, and house historians. They can tell you about the age, changing shape and structure of properties, as well as shifting land usage and ownership. They are also worth looking at in more depth as records in of themselves. Moving…
Continue reading ➞ Mapping West Sussex – Part Two: County Orienteering and Plotting Estates
By Kim Leslie (with an Introduction by Nichola Court, Archivist) One of the joys of working at a county record office such as WSRO is the wide variety of collections we hold and the individual documents that can be found within them. Collections of family papers can hold a surprising array of documents concerning a…
Continue reading ➞ THE CORFIELD PAPERS – A New Accession: Part One
By Jo McConville, Project Archivist "United States Capitol, Washington, D. C." by Boston Public Library is licensed under CC BY 2.0 The day finally arrives for Joe Biden’s inauguration as 46th president of the United States, following an extraordinary few months of controversy and division since his election victory in early November, culminating in the…
Continue reading ➞ Transatlantic Ties: January 2021 Update – Inaugurations, MPs and Presidents
