Place:Henfield, 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

Henfield is a large village and civil parish in the Horsham District of West Sussex, England. It lies 33 miles (53 km) south of London, 12 miles (19 km) northwest of Brighton, and 30 miles (48 km) east northeast of the county town of Chichester at the road junction of the A281 and A2037. Other nearby towns include Burgess Hill to the east and Shoreham by Sea to the south.

The parish has a land area of 4,285 acres (1,734.1 ha or 6.7 sq mi). In the 2001 UK census 5,012 people lived in 2,153 households. The population at the 2011 UK census had increased to 5,349.

Just west of the town, the two branches of the River Adur, the western Adur and the eastern Adur, meet at Betley Bridge. From Henfield the Adur flows on into the English Channel at Shoreham by Sea.

Henfield was already a large village, of 52 households, at the time of the Domesday Book of 1086.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Henfield.

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 Henfield
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 6, Part 3, Bramber Rape: North-Eastern Part is the first of a number of chapters on Henfield.