Celebrating our collections dating from 780AD to the present day
By Victoria Evans. Searchroom Archivist In our ongoing efforts to list all of our building plans from across the county, I kept coming across America Lane and New England Road within the Cuckfield Urban District plans. From this, I searched Google Maps and found other America-related named roads such as Washington Road, Pilgrims Gardens, Boston…
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 Jenny Bettger, Research Assistant When researching genealogy, you often come across individuals or family groups that stand out. This was the case for me with the Glue family, who I discovered when I was looking at families with longstanding links to the Rogate area. The Glues, or Clues, as they were also known, were…
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 Abigail Hartley, Searchroom Archivist The easy answer to 'When was the first census held?' in the British Isles can be as simple an answer as 1801. Or 1841. Or 1086. Or Roman times if you really want to stretch the purpose and definition of a census. So, let's define a census. For our purposes,…
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…
In 2017 the Sussex Record Society published a fascinating volume of church court proceedings taken from the Diocesan Archives held at the Record Office. Depositions, which can be found in the Ep/I/11 series, are the accounts of cases held at the Bishop of Chichester’s Consistory Court. These courts covered a plethora of local issues and disputes including quarrels over wills, tithe disputes, matrimonial disagreements, and the ever amusing defamation cases. However they can be difficult to read and interpret for the modern reader, which is where the Sussex Record Society and Peter Wilkinson got involved.
By Abigail Hartley, Searchroom Archivist One of the most crucial aspects that our volunteers tirelessly work towards is the accessioning of our smaller collections. AM (Additional Manuscripts) contain some of our most visually interesting and varied documents. Within the last 12 months, here is a quick overview of just some of the items we have…
In two earlier blog posts we talked about the ongoing project to catalogue Southern England Railway employee cards. We're very happy to announce that the railway employment cards for employees whose surname begins with the letter ‘A’ are now online in the Record Office catalogue http://www.westsussexpast.org.uk/searchonline/default.aspx and can be found by typing SEREC into the…
In September 2017 I was asked if I would like to be involved in a project to catalogue information about Railway employees. As someone with a lifelong interest in and passion for the Railways, initially as a young trainspotter at Surbiton on the Southern Region of BT and then at various times during my professional…