Place:Kingston near Lewes, Sussex, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

Kingston near Lewes is a small village and fairly large civil parish situated at the base of the South Downs in the Lewes District of East Sussex, England. The village is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 and is located two miles (3.2 km) south of Lewes on the slopes of the South Downs.

Juggs Lane (a road used as a public path which runs by a pub of the same name), is named after the fish-carrying baskets used by Brighton fishwives on their way through Kingston to the market at Lewes. The path may still be traversed by foot, and continues almost to Brighton.

Many of the older houses are in the original village centre, "The Street", a picturesque mixture of cottages and larger farmhouses that leads past St. Pancras Church and the village pound, where stray sheep were once kept, to the South Downs Way.

During the 1930s to 1950s, a number of substantial houses were built on Kingston Ridge and in the early 1960s orchard land was developed to form what is known locally as "the estate": family houses that helped serve the establishment of the University of Sussex at that time.

The Prime Meridian passes to the east of Kingston near Lewes. The area of the parish is 5.7 km2 (2.2 sq mi) and its population at the UK census of 2011 was 831.

Research Tips

• The East Sussex Record Office, The Keep, Woollards Way, Brighton, BN1 9BP, United Kingdom (email thekeep@eastsussex.gov.uk) holds material for the Archdeaconry of Lewes, present-day East Sussex, and therefore generally holds historical material for East Sussex parishes only. An on-line catalogue for some of the collections held by the East Sussex Record Office (ESRO) is available under the Access to Archives (A2A) project (a nationwide facility housed at The National Archives, Kew).
• 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.
• Further resources may be found on GENUKI's main page on Sussex.
• 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 Kingston near Lewes
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 7, Lewes Hundred, section on Kingston near Lewes
• Maps of the local area are to be found on the WeRelate page for Lewes Rape and on that for Newhaven Rural District.