Place:Ferring, Sussex, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

Ferring is a village and civil parish in the Arun District of West Sussex, England. It is part of the built-up area of Worthing and is accessed along the A259 road 3 miles (4.8 km) west of the town. It comprises North Down Farm and Highdown Hill to the north and the town itself to the south, with approximately equal size green buffers to the town to east and west.

In the 2001 UK census 4,361 people lived in 2,179 households. The area's seafront is pedestrianised and the beach itself is a mixture of shingle and pebble, reinforced by groynes. The population at the 2011 UK Census was 4,480. The parish has an area of 3.81 km2 (1.47 sq mi).

The site of the village is an ancient one: the name itself is Saxon and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). The parish church is Norman, and is dedicated to St. Andrew. In the churchyard are buried the ashes of Major John Bigelow Dodge (1894-1960), veteran of the Great Escape of 1944.

Until the 1920s the village was a small one. When the south coast began to be built-up, particularly with holiday homes, Ferring began to increase in size.

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 Ferring
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex does not cover the Poling Hundred.
• Maps of the local area are to be found on the page for Arundel Rape and on that for East Preston Rural District.