Place:Edburton, Sussex, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

The following description from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72 is provided by the website A Vision of Britain Through Time (University of Portsmouth Department of Geography).

"EDBURTON, a parish in Steyning [registration] district, Sussex; on the [South] Downs, 3½ miles E of Steyning [railway] station. It includes the hamlet of Fulking; and its post town is Steyning, under Hurstperpoint. Acres: 2,651. Real property: £820. Population: 300. Houses: 67. The property is not much divided. The living is a rectory in the diocese of Chichester. Value: £379. Patron: the Archbishop of Canterbury. The church has a carved pulpit of the time of James I., and a circular leaden Norman font; and is good."

The thinly population parish of Edburton lay partly in the Burbeach Hundred of Bramber Rape and partly in the Poynings Hundred of Lewes Rape. The border between the rapes approximated to a north-south line. In 1894 Edburton was divided in two along this line with the western section retaining the name Edburton and continuing to exist in Bramber Rape and the eastern section created into a new parish named Fulking (named after a hamlet within that section). (Source: British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 6, Part 1, Bramber Rape: Southern Part) Fulking commenced with 46 houses originally in Edburton.

In 1933 Edburton was abolished to enlarge the parish of Upper Beeding. This was an area of 1094 acres with, by that time, a population of 83. (Source: A Vision of Britain Through Time)

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 Edburton
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 6, Part 1, Bramber Rape: Southern Part, the first of a number of chapters on Edburton. The first page on Edburton contains a map showing both Edburton and Fulking.