Celebrating our collections dating from 780AD to the present day
By Nick Corbo-Stewart, Archivist and Volunteer Coordinator In this series of blogs looking at new collections at West Sussex Record Office (WSRO), I will continue to guide you, the reader, through the variety of work undertaken by the volunteers. Through a culmination of sorting, listing, ordering, cataloguing and packaging, their completed collections are now open…
By Jenny Bettger, Archives Assistant (Research) Researching family history is often searching through increasingly hard-to-read documents, trying to find more than just the basic facts about our ancestors. Beyond the first few generations, you are unlikely to have any photographs or idea of what the people looked like. Photographs can help us to connect to…
By Victoria Evans, Searchroom Archivist, in collaboration with Jennifer Mason, Senior Archivist (Collections Manager), and Linda and Catherine, WSRO cataloguing volunteers Within our Episcopal Records, the miscellaneous court papers (MCPs) are a set of documents that have remained largely unknown to us, as they have been in too poor a condition to enable them to…
Continue reading ➞ Cataloguing the Miscellaneous Court Papers
By Victoria Evans, Searchroom Archivist On a recent walk down the Chichester Canal heading towards Hunston, I was told about the Carmelite Convent that housed a closed-order nun community between 1872 until 1994 which I had not heard of, even after living in Chichester for three years now! This sparked inspiration to see what we…
By Louise Conway, Archives Assistant PH 32684/25 Over collection care fortnight 2025, the team added over 2000 new records to our collection database, many of these relating to the Uppark collection, in turn uncovering even more stories around the infamous estate. Situated in South Harting, West Sussex, Uppark, as it is recognised today, was built…
By Nick Corbo-Stewart, Archivist and Volunteer Coordinator In this series of blogs looking at new collections at West Sussex Record Office (WSRO), I will continue to guide you, the reader, through the variety of work undertaken by the volunteers. Through a culmination of sorting, listing, ordering, cataloguing and packaging, their completed collections are now open…
By Victoria Evans, Searchroom Archivist 🎃 Halloween is upon us and in today’s blog post we will be taking a peek into some of the ghostly occurrences that can be teased out from our collections. 👻 St Cuthman’s School The Victorian mansion that went onto house school children was originally built in 1876 for Alexander…
By Nick Corbo-Stewart, Archivist With the new season now underway, in this article we feature some of the items from our diverse West Sussex Record Office (WSRO) collections related to the game. They present to the researcher a sense of the investment, dedication, competition and excitement generated by the football season across Sussex: Collection title:…
By Louise Conway, Archives Assistant In this first part of a two part blog series we will be exploring the history of Shoreham's Bungalow Town. To begin we will look at Shoreham pre Bungalow Town and the moving onto the early days of the site, the bungalows themselves and what life was like. This blog…
By Tim Hudson, guest writer What is the largest building in Chichester after the cathedral? Most residents will know County Hall, tucked away behind West Street. A public right of way runs past it; and whenever a news item about the County Council appears in the press it is likely to be accompanied by a…