Place:Coldwaltham, Sussex, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Coldwaltham is a village and civil parish in the Chichester District of West Sussex, England. It is divided in two by the A29 road and lies 2.4 miles (3.9 km) southwest of Pulborough which has both a railway station on the Arun Valley Line and a bus connection to Worthing.

The 13th century Anglican parish church is dedicated to Saint Giles; a rare 11th century gravestone and a simple Saxon font are present on the site. A yew tree near the north west corner is among the oldest in England, believed to be over 3000 years old.

The parish covers an area of 8.93 km2 (3.45 sq mi). The UK census of 2001 gave a population of 845, that of 2011, 941. This inclued the hamlet of Watersfield and that of the small parish of Hardham which had a count of less that 100 persons.

Research Tips

• The West Sussex Record Office is located in Chichester. Because it holds the records of the Church of England Diocese of Chichester, which covers the whole of Sussex, it has church records relating to both parts of Sussex.
• An on-line catalogue for some of the collections held by the West Sussex Record Office is available under the Access to Archives (A2A) project (a nationwide facility housed at The National Archives, Kew).
• West Sussex Past - database of 2 million records from West Sussex heritage organizations.
• The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies' Sussex Collection (PDF). This is a 9-page PDF naming the files relating to Sussex in their collection-a possible first step in a course of research.
• The National Library of Scotland has a website which provides maps taken from the Ordnance Survey England & Wales One-Inch to the Mile series of 1892-1908 as well as equivalent maps for Scotland itself. The immediate presentation is a "help" screen and a place selection screen prompting the entry of a location down to town, village or parish level. These screens can be removed by a click of the "X". The map is very clear and shows parish and county boundaries and many large buildings and estates that existed at the turn of the 20th century. Magnification can be adjusted and an "overlay feature" allows inspection of the area today along with that of 1900. The specific map from the series can be viewed as a whole ("View this map") and this allows the inspection of the map legend (found in the left hand bottom corner. Becoming familiar with the various facilities of these maps is well worth the trouble.

• GENUKI on Coldwaltham
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex does not cover the Bury Hundred.
• Maps of the local area are to be found on the page for Arundel Rape and on that for Thakeham Rural District.