Place:East Lavington, Sussex, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

East Lavington, formerly Woolavington, is a village and civil parish in the Chichester District of West Sussex, England and formerly in the Rotherbridge Hundred of Sussex. The village is located six kilometres (4 miles) south of Petworth, west of the A285 road.

West Lavington was formerly a detached part of the parish of Woolavington. It is located a considerable distance to the west in the middle of what was the Easebourne Hundred and is now a separate parish.

East Lavington has a land area of 797 hectares (1,968 acres or 3.08 sq mi). In the 2001 UK census 357 people lived in 87 households. By the 2011 UK census the population had dropped to 273. The parish includes the settlement of Upper Norwood.

Sources do not state when Woolavington became East Lavington, but it may have been 1933 when the parish absorbed a detached part of Burton parish, or with the changes to local government that took place in 1894.

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).

"WOOLAVINGTON, a parish in Midhurst district, Sussex; nominally 2½ miles SSW of Petworth [railway] station, but partly adjoining Midhurst, and comprising several portions at considerable distances from one another. It has a post-office, of the name of Lavington, under Petworth. Acres: 2,530. Real property: £2,177. Population: 488. Houses: 87. Lavington House belongs to Bishop Wilberforce; and Beechwood house is the seat of Miss Noel. The living is a rectory in the diocese of Chichester. Value: £277. Patron: Bishop Wilberforce. The church is good. Charities: £8."

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 East Lavington. Their article is titled by its former name of Woolavington.
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex does not cover the Rotherbridge Hundred.
• Maps of the local area are to be found on the page for Chichester Rape and on that for Midhurst Rural District.