Celebrating our collections dating from 780AD to the present day
The story of Queen Victoria Hospital (QVH) begins in 1863 with its founding as a cottage hospital on Green Hedges Avenue, East Grinstead, in the home of Dr John Henry Rogers. It was only the fifth cottage hospital to be established in England – from its earliest days the hospital was a…
Continue reading ➞ Queen Victoria Hospital Archive Project: the history of the hospital
Back in January 2012, West Sussex Record Office Conservator Simon Hopkins and I thought up a plan to make the Quarter Sessions rolls more accessible. These are local government records: essentially the business of the courts which ran the administration of the county before the advent of the County Council. The earliest ones are fascinating…
Continue reading ➞ A Slice of Life – The Quarter Sessions records
As regular readers of this blog will be aware, since 2016 WSRO has been engaged in a major project involving the archive of the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, which became known during the Second World War as the centre for the treatment of the ‘Guinea Pig Club’, the RAF…
Continue reading ➞ Queen Victoria Hospital Archive project: Introducing the project
This month sees the centenary of a major success for women’s suffrage. When the Representation of the People Act became law on 6th February 1918, women over 30, who were occupiers of property or married to occupiers, became entitled to vote for the first time in British history. West Sussex Libraries have been finding out…
I had assumed that every patient who died in a UK war hospital during World War 1 would have a Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) headstone, but I was wrong….. I am cataloguing the records of Graylingwell Hospital in Chichester, among which are some items about Graylingwell War Hospital (1915-1919). There are no existing formal…
Continue reading ➞ In Remembrance – Driver George Slater – Graylingwell War Hospital – WW1
Prior to the British Witchcraft Act of 1735, the infamous witch trails of the Early Modern period saw widespread moral panic sweep through a religiously unstable Europe, resulting in the horrific punishment of individuals for their supposed sorcery. Although no instances of witch drowning or burning have been evidenced in West Sussex, accusations of witchcraft still led to the persecution…
Continue reading ➞ Witchcraft and the ‘Wicked Women’ of Sussex
‘Earlier today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way. Well, if you’re watching, don’t worry, there isn’t’ Many will remember the immortal words of weatherman Michael Fish, whose casual dismissal of the approaching storm left the UK public completely unprepared for the weather front that…
Continue reading ➞ Wild Was the Wind in West Sussex: The Great Storm of 1987
Come along and join us at Horsham Library on Saturday 21 October, 10:00- 4:00pm for a West Sussex Libraries Family History Fun Day! There will be an opportunity to meet experts from Sussex Family History Group, West Sussex Record Office, Times Digital Archive, Guild of One Name Studies and others. Information Librarians and Archivists will be available to…
Continue reading ➞ Family History Fun Day – A genealogical extravaganza for all the family!
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…
Vehicle licensing records aid Classic Car restoration We can receive all manner of enquiries here at the Record Office, and while some may assume that our reach is bound by county borders, and primarily focussed on local history, we are always eager to highlight that the simplest of records can have far-reaching effects. We recently received…
West Sussex Record Office 