Place:Horsted Keynes, 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

Horsted Keynes is a village and civil parish in the Mid Sussex District of West Sussex, England. The village is about 5 miles (8 km) northeast of Haywards Heath, in the Weald. The civil parish is largely rural, covering 1,581 hectares (3,910 acres), and has a population of 1,586 (2011 UK census) (increased from 1,507 in 2001). The Prime Meridian passes about 1 mile to the east of the village of Horsted Keynes.

This part of Sussex was known for its iron industry long before the industrial revolution and the coming of the railways. Little remains of this now, except for the hammer ponds and other traces of this activity dotted around the surrounding countryside, although iron working is remembered in many local place names.

Horsted Keynes was transferred from East Sussex to West Sussex, England in 1974 as part of the creation of the Mid Sussex District.

Research Tips

• The East Sussex Record Office, The Keep, Woollards Way, Brighton, BN1 9BP, United Kingdom (email thekeep@eastsussex.gov.uk) holds material for the Archdeaconry of Lewes, present-day East Sussex, and therefore generally holds historical material for East Sussex parishes only. An on-line catalogue for some of the collections held by the East Sussex Record Office (ESRO) is available under the Access to Archives (A2A) project (a nationwide facility housed at The National Archives, Kew).
• 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.
• Further resources may be found on GENUKI's main page on Sussex.
• 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 Horsted Keynes
• Maps of the local area are to be found on the WeRelate page for Lewes Rape and on that for Chailey Rural District.
• A History of the County of Sussex provided by British History Online does not include articles on parishes that were part of Pevensey Rape.