Place:Southwater, Sussex, England

Watchers
NameSouthwater
TypeParish
Coordinates51.024°N 0.352°W
Located inSussex, England
Also located inWest Sussex, England    
See alsoHorsham District, West Sussex, Englanddistrict municipality covering the area since 1974
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
source: Family History Library Catalog


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

Southwater is a large village and civil parish in the Horsham District of West Sussex, England, with a population of roughly 10,000. Development and certain services are overseen by the Council of Horsham District and West Sussex County Council.

History

One of the oldest buildings in the parish is Great House Farmhouse, a listed building at Grade II* built up from a late medieval structure in the Tudor period just west of the town.

Whilst mixed agriculture provided a lucrative industry for centuries, much of the population of Southwater originated from the workforce of the brick industry which thrived in the clay-pits until the 1980s. Following the closure of the brickworks, there was a project implemented to transform the area into a country park, which is now a major family attraction in the district.

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.
This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Southwater. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.