Place:Easebourne, Sussex, England

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

Easebourne is a village and civil parish in the Chichester District of West Sussex, England. It is half a mile (0.8 km) north of Midhurst, across the River Rother on the A272 and A286 roads. The parish includes the hamlet of Henley to the north. In the 2011 census there were 850 households with a total population of 1,820. The area of the parish was given as 6.93 sq miles.

Easebourne was listed in the Domesday Book of 1086 as an ancient Hundred, an extensive area reaching as far afield as Graffham and Cocking to the south and Stedham to the west, as well as two hamlets that were not parishes: Todham to the southeast and Buddington to the west; in total it included 12 settlements containing 276 households.

The Midhurst Union Workhouse was opened in 1794 in Easebourne and provided accommodation originally for the destitute of seventeen parishes, rising to 26 parishes from 1835.

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 Easebourne
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 4, the Rape of Chichester, section on Easebourne
• Maps of the local area are to be found on the page for Chichester Rape and on that for Midhurst Rural District, and also that for Easebourne Hundred.